feat: Add new post - #35
Open
IsaacOldwood wants to merge 1 commit into
Open
Conversation
|
|
||
| ## Taking the Leap | ||
|
|
||
| The first time I ever came across Codebar was actually during a job interview. I was interviewing a candidate to join an adjacent product team that my team works closely with. The role was for a Senior Engineer, so I asked the candidate to explain how they would mentor a junior on their team through a tough problem. They immediately jumped into their experience as a coach at Codebar, explaining a particular problem they helped a student through and how their personal coaching process worked. I was inspired by the passion they spoke with so after the interview I took a closer look at Codebar. |
Contributor
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Whaaaaat!! I love this story so much
|
|
||
| Around the same time I was looking for conferences to speak at, this is when I came across Codebar Festival. I submitted my talk for review and I was overjoyed when I received the email that it had been accepted! As part of the process for writing and submitting the talk I learnt all about Codebar, the wonderful things they do and who they help. Because of this, I tailored my talk to people new to the Tech industry - I wanted it to be accessible to everyone. Without going into too much detail, I had an absolute blast at Codebar Festival. Everyone was so friendly, curious and passionate. I got to meet lots of Codebar students as well as coaches, and even the brilliant Codebar organising team! By the end of the day I knew I wanted to get more involved with Codebar. | ||
|
|
||
| The next step I wanted to take was to sign up as a Coach at a regular session; unfortunately life got in the way for a while. However, the dates finally aligned and I signed up to my first session to coach at Codebar Cambridge in June 2026. Although I have experience tutoring and mentoring before, I wasn't entirely sure what I'd need for this. Most of my previous experience has been as a Maths Tutor and mentoring engineers during pair programming and code reviews. I assumed that the skills would be similar but I wasn't entirely sure. This meant I had a few reservations before my first session. A couple of my concerns were: what if the student asks me about a language or framework I don't know? What if they ask me about a problem I don't know the answer to? Reflecting on that experience, I now see that those doubts are likely what prevent many potential volunteers from joining the coaches. However, in the end, those worries didn't matter nearly as much as I had initially feared. |
Contributor
There was a problem hiding this comment.
could coach be lowercase here please? First line of this paragrah
|
|
||
| Around the same time I was looking for conferences to speak at, this is when I came across Codebar Festival. I submitted my talk for review and I was overjoyed when I received the email that it had been accepted! As part of the process for writing and submitting the talk I learnt all about Codebar, the wonderful things they do and who they help. Because of this, I tailored my talk to people new to the Tech industry - I wanted it to be accessible to everyone. Without going into too much detail, I had an absolute blast at Codebar Festival. Everyone was so friendly, curious and passionate. I got to meet lots of Codebar students as well as coaches, and even the brilliant Codebar organising team! By the end of the day I knew I wanted to get more involved with Codebar. | ||
|
|
||
| The next step I wanted to take was to sign up as a Coach at a regular session; unfortunately life got in the way for a while. However, the dates finally aligned and I signed up to my first session to coach at Codebar Cambridge in June 2026. Although I have experience tutoring and mentoring before, I wasn't entirely sure what I'd need for this. Most of my previous experience has been as a Maths Tutor and mentoring engineers during pair programming and code reviews. I assumed that the skills would be similar but I wasn't entirely sure. This meant I had a few reservations before my first session. A couple of my concerns were: what if the student asks me about a language or framework I don't know? What if they ask me about a problem I don't know the answer to? Reflecting on that experience, I now see that those doubts are likely what prevent many potential volunteers from joining the coaches. However, in the end, those worries didn't matter nearly as much as I had initially feared. |
Contributor
There was a problem hiding this comment.
could we hyperlink codebar Cambridge please? https://codebar.io/cambridge
Contributor
|
@IsaacOldwood This is such a wonderful blogpost Isaac, thank you so so much! A few tiny tweaks, would there also be a possibility of adding a photo? |
what to expect when coaching
Author
|
@KimberleyCook I'm so glad you like it! I have made the tweaks requested. Unfortunately I don't have any photos from the session. I reached out to the Codebar Cambridge team and they also don't have any. Do you have a generic codebar one I could use perhaps? Or I can try and grab one next time. |
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
2 participants
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
As discussed this is a new blog post about my experience being a first time coach at Cambridge Codebar