Mentz - The Story Continues

Introduction

It’s been over three months since I launched Mentz on an unsuspecting Salesforce ecosystem, and the results have far exceeded my expectations. I’d have been quite happy with a couple of people attempting the challenges that I mentored myself, but it’s fair to say we are well past that. At the time of writing (September 2019) we have 90 mentees, 24 mentors and 45 solutions that have been mentored. The standard of mentoring is incredible - a lot of very smart people are putting a lot of effort into helping others in their development journey.

Release, Review, Repeat

Creating and maintaining the tooling around Mentz has been an interesting aspect for me, not least because of how wrong I’ve been about some of it.
My original plan was to have two stages in a solution lifecycle - mentoring and publication. A mentee would iterate on their solution based on mentor feedback and when they were completely happy with it, publish it for the wider mentee community to see and comment on. This was pretty much entirely unsuccessful and just caused confusion about where to post solutions. We now have a single place where solutions are published which anyone can access.
Solutions were originally uploaded as chatter files until one of the Mentors asked me to turn on "Allow Inclusion of Code Snippets from UI” - now if the solution fits int the 10k chatter message limit it is uploaded as a snippet, which is a lot easier to respond to (thanks Adam Lasek).
The challenges typically involved a class with multiple methods to be built out. While I always created my own (unpublished) reference solutions, as I’d come up with the scenario it didn’t take me very long. When a few solutions stacked up and I mentored them on a weekend, it took me almost all day! So I created a couple of short challenges to see what kind of reception they would get.
I used to regularly post into the Mentor group to let everyone know if there were any solutions awaiting a response. This always lead to apologetic replies from the Mentors, which wasn’t what I was after at all - I just wanted to avoid them having to poll the org to see if there was anything they could help with. I replaced this with a lightning web component rendered in in the Mentors group home page that listed any unanswered solutions, which seems to have helped.

There have also been some other changes to try to make things easier/more interesting:

A Suggestion Box repository for mentees (or anyone really) to suggest challenges they’d like to take
The ability to lock a solution to a single mentor. The idea here is that a mentor claims a solution and is the only one (aside from the original author) that can respond to it. I haven’t turned this on yet as AFAIK we’ve only had one instance where two mentors were working on responses to the same solution at the same time.
Mentee and Mentor leaderboards - people seem to like these so I’ve added them to the group home pages. I’m at the top of the Mentor leaderboard, but only because I mop up any solutions that haven’t had a response after a few days. I don’t have to do this, but I do feel a sense of responsibility having enticed mentees to join.
The Mentz Salesforce CLI plugin now has a challenges topic that lists the available challenges (optionally including those already completed) and clones the repo for the user:

            $ sfdx mentz:publish --targetusername myOrg@example.com --all

              Select a challenge
              1) COLLECTION SIMPLE 1
              2) CONDITIONAL SIMPLE 1 (Completed)
              0) Quit

              Choose a challenge: 1
              Cloning repository = https://github.com/mentzbb/SimpleCollections1
              ...
             Done

What’s Next

As I wrote in my original Mentz blog post:

If things do take off, I don’t want to handle everything out of a single org myself, as that will limit scale. Instead I'll make the code available as a package so that others can host their own instance of Mentz, in their own org. We'll all use a common set of challenges, but the actual mentoring will be distributed.

With 90 mentees it feels like my first org is getting pretty close to as big as I want it to get, so it’s time to test the waters and see if anyone else wants to host Mentz. Here’s a few things to think about before you jump in:

This will be a developer edition setup by me that you then take over - this isn’t (only) because I’m a megalomaniac, but more because I want to go through the setup a few times to get it documented before leaving people to face it on their own. The Mentz code will be deployed as unpackaged code - it might be packaged up in the future, but at present it won’t add much and just adds more work for me :) It does also allow me to keep an eye on the standard of mentoring, as it’s been stellar so far and I’d like to keep it up there.
There’s not very much housekeeping - mostly it’s emailing the Mentee/Mentor requestors and then executing a lightning action to convert the request to a user. I usually do half a dozen or so a week.
The challenges are the same for every Mentee, all that changes is the org they post solutions to and who mentors.
If you host a Mentz instance, be prepared to act as the Mentor of last resort - this doesn’t happen often, but I think it’s quite important to make sure that posts are getting answered. I usually allow about a week for the mentors to dive in and then start picking things up myself, usually over the weekend.
Lots of people will register an interest and never even login - remember that this is Mentz where we do what we want, so this is absolutely fine. Never try to make people do anything, although it’s okay to check from time to time to make sure they aren’t trying and struggling/failing.
You need to have some reach to attract Mentees/Mentors - I’d imagine it’s a bit dispiriting to announce this is happening and receive zero interest :)

If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, fill in the short form at https://bobbuzz.me.uk/MentzHosting - it will almost certainly take me a week or two to do anything so don’t panic if you don’t hear back quickly.

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Bob Buzzard Blog

Saturday 7 September 2019