I came across codebar a year ago (someone mentioned it to me at the You Got This conference). Although there was one near me it was on an evening when I already had a regular thing on, and it started half an hour after I finished work in a place that took longer than half an hour to get to in rush hour. At the time I bookmarked it as something I might be able to go to on occasion if I skipped my evening thing and took the afternoon off work.
But then the pandemic happened and they went virtual. Although I had forgotten about them until the end of last year. I found they had a virtual session this week and they were in need of mentors. I didn't have anything specific I needed help with, but my imposter syndrome told me that because I don't know everything and there are lots of people who know more than me, it means I can't be of any use at all.
I reminded it that I know more than I used to and as my teacher friends have said in the past, you only need be one chapter ahead of your students. So I signed up.
On the night I was nervous. What if I was no use to whoever I was paired with? What if they asked about something I knew nothing about? What if I just got confused about how to use Slack and Discord?
As it turned out I had nothing to worry about. My computer behaved itself (for a change, this year!), I had a nice chat and was some help. It turned out to be not entirely different from times at work when someone messages with something that doesn't work and they don't know why - and when I look it's not always obvious why (but sometimes it is) (usually when I'm the one asking it's the most obvious, simple thing in the world that's wrong).
It all worked just as they said it would, really. It would be nice to go to one in the real world and meet more people on the same journey as me, but then the same could be said of a lot of things in the past 10 months.
In the meantime I'll be signing up to do some more mentoring at Codebar in the future.
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