Mentoring

I’ve been at Jiva for a month now and it’s time to pull myself away from the code. For the last 4 weeks Jon’s been mentoring me, which outwardly looks like an excuse to pop down to Baristas (never a bad thing), but it’s really to help me along with my personal development. We both come from different backgrounds, but Jon is the voice of experience, which works out brilliantly for me. After going through Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody“, we’ve been looking at everything from Porter’s framework through to the more embarrassingly obvious, organisation techniques.

The aim is to hone my current geek skill set, but also develop the business side as well. This means I get to apply it all on my own website idea during 10% time. So far my quest to get down to the syrupy essence of it has seen me fighting with the five forces, and poking PEST, which is rather reminiscent of Uni. On the techie end I’m working on the presentation side of things by improving my CSS starting with the Blueprint project and then I shall investigate unobstrusive Javascript.