One-to-one software engineering mentorship for junior developers, and coaching for new tech leads and the teams they run. You learn on your own code and your own problems, with someone who has spent eighteen years building in PHP, Python and JavaScript and fifteen of them in ecommerce.
Mentorships
A mentorship is time with an experienced engineer spent on your work: reading the code you are stuck on, reviewing the pull request you are unsure of, and talking through why a system is built the way it is. I taught myself to code, so I know how much of the job is never written down in a course.
It isn’t a course with a syllabus you work through alone, and it isn’t someone doing the work for you. The aim is that you need me less every month.
What gets taught
Every mentorship starts from where you are and what you are working on. These are the areas it usually covers, in whatever order your work brings them up.
Foundations
Most of a developer’s time is spent in code someone else wrote, often years ago. We work through real codebases, Laravel, Django, Magento or a Next.js app, and practise finding your way in: where a request enters, where data is stored, and how to change one thing without breaking three others.
Foundations
Reproducing the problem, reading the logs and the stack trace, narrowing it down, and proving the fix. It is the skill that most separates a junior developer from a mid-level one, and it is learnt by doing it on real bugs with someone beside you.
Practice
Writing tests that catch real mistakes, commits that tell a story, and pull requests a reviewer can follow. I review your pull requests the way a senior colleague would, with the reasoning written down so you can apply it next time.
Design
How to model data so the application stays simple, where indexes matter, how to spot a query that will be slow at scale, and why most performance problems start in the database rather than the code.
Design
The mistakes that turn up in almost every audit: injection, trusting user input, secrets in the repository, pages that make fifty queries. Learning to see them in your own code early is cheaper than learning it from an incident.
Specialism
For developers moving into ecommerce: how Magento’s modules, plugins and dependency injection fit together, how Shopify apps and themes work, and what makes an online store different from other web applications, from checkout to stock to search.
Tools
AI coding tools make a junior developer faster and can also stop them learning. We work out where they help, how to check what they produce, and how to keep understanding the code you ship rather than pasting it in.
For teams
For a developer who has just become a tech lead: planning work, reviewing others’ code, making architecture decisions you can defend, and saying no to scope. For a whole team: sessions that get people confident and productive with modern tools and AI, taught on your own codebase, so the time saved goes back into the work.
A business can sponsor a mentorship for a junior hire, too. It is often cheaper than the time a senior developer loses answering the same questions.
| A course | A bootcamp | A mentorship | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A syllabus you work through alone, at your own pace. | A structured programme with a cohort, over a fixed number of weeks. | Time with an experienced engineer, spent on your own work. |
| Feedback on your code | Rarely, and not on your real projects. | On exercises and a final project. | On the code you are writing this week, in your job. |
| Best for | Learning a new tool or language from scratch. | Changing career into development. | Getting from junior to confident, or into ecommerce, faster. |
They work well together. The free courses here cover the ground; a mentorship covers what comes up when you use it.
Mentoring questions
Junior developers, whether from a degree, a bootcamp or self-taught, developers moving into ecommerce, and new tech leads. You should be writing code already; a mentorship helps you get better at it, faster.
PHP and Laravel, Python and Django, JavaScript and TypeScript with React and Next.js, and the ecommerce platforms: Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce.
A first call to agree what you want from it, then regular sessions on your own work, with code review and questions answered in between. The rhythm is agreed at the start and reviewed as we go.
Yes. I’m based in North Wales and mentor remotely, with screen sharing and your own repositories.
It depends on how often we meet and whether it is for one person or a team, so it is agreed on a free call before anything starts.
Yes. Businesses often sponsor a mentorship for a junior hire, and a team session can be booked by the business directly.
UK based · PHP · Python · JS · TS. Every first call is free.
