

Show HN: Codementor – instant one-to-one mentor for programming and design - weitingliu
http://www.codementor.io

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spking
This is essentially what I was attempting with <http://beginner.org>, and we
were using Screenhero. The biggest issue I encountered was on the scheduling
side; it's difficult to coordinate dates/times and availability between two
people with potentially different levels of commitment. If you can figure out
a way to reach a critical mass of available mentors across each of these
languages and frameworks so that you can truly offer "instant" mentoring on
demand, this will be sweet. Incidentally, we're shifting to a self-teaching
model because we couldn't overcome the scheduling challenges.

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michaelochurch
I agree with you. Their biggest challenge will be scheduling. Their goals are
quite noble but I think they should retract the "instant" promise because if
they want to be selective in their mentor pool, they're going to have trouble
meeting that.

ETA: what kinds of hourly rates do tutors tend to make? I'm just curious how
that market plays out.

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spking
We asked tutors what they wanted to charge per hour, and the average was ~$35
(from 96 submissions).

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michaelochurch
Did you vet for quality/capability?

What I'm afraid of in this space is that you're going to have a mix of (a)
unaffordable good ones and (b) cheap, less capable people.

It depends on location and opportunities but half-decent freelancers tend to
be over $100/hour where I am (New York). People will work at a lower rate for
good-citizen reasons (and because they care about the technologies, want to
meet new people) but that component is limited and will never get to on-demand
service.

~~~
spking
That's exactly right. The good-citizen effect works against you, because even
the most talented developers with the best intentions to help others won't be
as committed or available as the middling developer who actually needs the
money. Quality control became an issue almost immediately for us, and managing
that component can become a FT job rather quickly. I think this _can_ work,
but probably has a better chance as a Kumon-type model where you have much
tighter QA over your mentors and can provide a consistent experience to
learners.

~~~
niels_olson
But teaching will only make the middling developer better. Trust me, this
won't be the first time students labor under less-than-perfect teachers. At
least these will be motivated.

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ldubinets
You should have the option of free mentoring in return for free mentorship.
For example, I'm proficient enough in JavaScript, ruby, and c# to mentor
others and even charge for it. But if its not a very intense schedule, I'd
happy to do it for free in return for free mentorship of something I am
currently learning (such as Haskell or iOS development). So if I get credits
for free mentoring that I can use to pay other mentors, that would be sweet.
Though i suppose I might as well just charge for the mentoring I do and pay
other mentors for that money.

~~~
codereflection
I second this idea

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metaraine
There's a lot of demand right now for expert-level 1-on-1 code mentoring.
Traditional education doesn't come close to providing the skills needed for
modern development, and while the resources are available to learn on your
own, beginners naturally don't have the intuition for what resources are high
quality/best practice. In fact, the lack of intuition I think is a ceiling for
the usefulness of online tutorials such as <http://codecademy.com>. No matter
how advanced they get, eventually you need someone to step in with expert
guidance to make sure you're on the right track.

Disclaimer: I teach programming 1-on-1 at <http://collegecoding.com>.

Since moving all my teaching to Skype, I've increased my rates from $35 to $45
to $55 to $65/hr since October. It's just that high quality 1-on-1 instructors
are hard to find, and opening up to teaching online gives you access to a
large market. I know that learning coding with me is saving my clients a ton
of time if they were to try on their own. Perhaps my rates are still too low.

Personally I'm thrilled that services like on-demand mentoring are starting to
be offered right now. It's a great time to experiment with new ways of
teaching technologies. I've been thinking myself about the best way to scale
this.

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juretriglav
Looks good! First of all, I honestly wish you will find (or have already
found) a workable business model for this. Connecting people with experience
to people seeking help/advice worldwide in a 1:1 fashion is a concept that
extends beyond coding. Choosing coding as the niche market to attend to first
is probably a good idea, given the tech savviness and available funds of your
target audience, but I have high hopes for a general 1:1 knowledge exchange
platform emerging from one of these projects. I myself have built a 1:1
learning/teaching web app during last year's Rails rumble
(<http://goteachly.com>), but failed to find a reasonable business model
following that. The dreamer in me hates to give up on that one.

Fingers crossed, weitingliu.

~~~
spking
<http://pearl.com> has a good headstart on this, although I think it's limited
by the single question/single answer format.

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darrellsilver
This is awesome. What's funny to me, and this is reflected in the comments
here, is that people don't think this kind of service can scale. That is
completely wrong.

Human-powered backends to internet services should not be nearly as scary to
startups as people currently think. From telesales teams to customer support,
and now mentoring / teaching it's all proving very possible.

In our market research for <http://www.thinkful.com/> we found several
beginners who described (WORD FOR WORD) access to experts like that which you
provide as "the holy grail" of learning.

Best of luck!

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mrisse
Ideas like this and <http://airpair.com> are really exciting to me. Being able
to summon an expert on demand and quickly solve problems outside of your
expertise sounds great. Check out
<http://www.meetup.com/remotepairprogrammers/> if you're interested in a "free
version" of this concept.

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bomatson
I'm a self-taught software engineer and I can say with confidence a product
like this is 1000x more valuable for the student. Enforce the mentor's
schedule and this could really take off, I will certainly be using / paying
for it

~~~
darrellsilver
Wow - that's great to hear. I'm too embarrassed to put our company's URL in
this comment because it'd be too obviously advertising. But man, are we doing
exactly what you're asking for!

~~~
bomatson
Nice! I'll check out Thinkful, I might need something a bit more advanced /
focused on Rails tho

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luxbock
Is there any reason to limit the amount of languages you can get mentored in?
I would be interested in using this if it was available for Clojure.

~~~
weitingliu
We're focusing on a few selected categories in the beginning. Clojure is
certainly what we'd like to get to next!

~~~
DanWaterworth
I had the same experience, but my greatest area of expertise is in Haskell.

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zachgersh
This is where I wish I knew how far along the product was. Unfortunately we
have no way of knowing whether this is just an email sign up page to gauge
interest or if the product is close to being ready to ship.

I hope it's the latter because I am very interested. A blog from the team
would be a good thing to setup next.

~~~
jkresner
airpair.com is working and we can service you straight away.

~~~
ralphos
Nice. Just signed up and created an application. Excited to see what may come
out of this. I'm more interested in pairing with somebody who's better than me
rather than working on a specific problem of my choice so hopefully someone
can help!

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astrism
I like the approach that <http://airpair.com> took, they let the mentors
choose their desired rate. They also let the students choose from a list of
qualified applicants.

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gverri
AirPair charges $20/h to not make the video public. That's completely
nonsense. And $60/h for NDA. Outrageous.

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jkresner
We encourage the videos to be public so:

1) The knowledge is opensourced 2) The experts can build their online presence
and prove their knowledge

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ahel
about 1) where do I can access your opensourced knowledge, then?

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wasd
Is it just me or was it not clear that this would cost money?

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fibbery
You're not alone... where does it say that? If I had known I wouldn't have
signed up. But it makes sense from the perspective of attracting mentors,
though to some degree I think you'd get more engagement if it was only
volunteer (studies show professionals are way more likely to do work for pro
bono than middling amounts of money)

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PaulFreund
I think it would be very useful to have a more detailed language
specification. For example I am experienced with JavaScript and Node.js
programming but I have no clue how to code for browsers properly. Also
additional languages like C# and C++ would be nice ( just to name the ones I'm
familiar with, but of course there are a lot more ). If that would improve I'd
try out mentoring, I really like the Idea!

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sambeau
I really like this idea but I think your categories are confused and
confusing.

First, I was disappointed to see the lack of a 'design' option. Then I
wondered whether you could be a designer or a code mentor for each category.
But designing for Ruby isn't really different to designing for Python (unless
you're designing a framework etc).

HTML/CSS is not design it's coding. Designing for HTML/CSS is certainly a
technical design skill.

Similarly iOS & Android present distinct design challenges despite both being
'mobile'. I'd be happy to advise on iOS design but would feel uncomfortable in
advising on Android as I'm unsure about the native idioms.

Could I suggest you add design categories for Visual design, Web design, UI/UX
design, iOS design, Android design.

You might want to consider copywriting too as it's a tricky and often
overlooked part of the creative process (and something that certain YC alumni
are naturally very good at).

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niels_olson
I would love to invite a mentor into a pythonanywhere console, or a
pythontutor session. However, I tend to agree that without credentialing, it's
hard to pony up dough for something like this. I find most people who answer
student questions just like answering student questions.

~~~
darrellsilver
Are you talking about credentialing for the student or for the mentors?

~~~
niels_olson
Mentors. The patient doesn't need credentials, the doctor does.

~~~
darrellsilver
Ah – gotcha. It's interesting: We do get asked about the qualifications of the
mentors by students before they start the class. But degrees and accreditation
rarely matter.

What we've learned is that people want to be taught by those with experience –
just like you want to be mentored by a co-worker with a lot of experience.

Virtually all of our students have full-time jobs, so perhaps this insight
applies more to our market than others.

Also note that most education for adults advertises the _real world_
experience and prominence of their professors, rather than from where they
received a degree.

~~~
niels_olson
there are still reasonable metrics that could be applied:

[http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-
compe...](http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-competency-
matrix.html)

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cyrus_
Like the idea! Would be nice to add server admin kinda stuff as an option too,
in addition to coding.

~~~
bridgeyman
This is exactly what I need right now.

~~~
makerops
Hey, shoot me an email anthony@makerops.com, Id be happy to help out.

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tharshan09
After I sign up to be a mentor, you said "spread the word".I think this is one
of the few times where I have looked for social icons, so I can +1 it on
google+. Other than that looks good. That form for applying to be a mentor
could be a lot more specific and cleaned up!

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rrosen326
Love it. I'm a new, self-teaching programmer and have been thinking how great
something like this would be, but assumed it couldn't possibly exist. And for
me, I don't really need immediate response. First I'd love email access for
moderately hot issues - say a couple hour turnaround. Second, I'd love code
reviews - "look at this and tell me how I could have done it better". Finally
would be one to one back and forths, but I could schedule that days in
advance.

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MichaelApproved
This would be a great addition to a site like Stack Exchange. There's another
site that does something similar to Stack Exchange and Code Mentor.

<http://JustAnswer.com> have exerts in law, computers, plumbing, etc. standing
by to answer your questions live and keep previous questions and answers
public to drive more traffic.

~~~
ebbflowgo
Upvote the SE recommendation.

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aviswanathan
Looked at the screenshot, is this using some sort of integration with
Screenhero? After playing/using Screenhero, I've been excited about the
possibility of incorporating it into web apps.

~~~
weitingliu
Yes we're currently using Screenhero and enjoying it thus far!

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Toshio
Oh, bummer. I just signed up as a mentor and now I see that Screenhero is only
available for Mac and windows.

But I'm a Linux-only guy. Bummer.

~~~
benbristow
Guess you could set up XP in a VirtualBox specifically for this purpose.

I know Teamviewer is compatible with Linux (They use a pre-configured
WINE/Mono type build, alike Picasa for Linux). Used it myself and it works as
well as the native thing on both ends.

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thomaspun
Nice. Mentoring on demand. What will your pricing model be?

~~~
weitingliu
Thanks! You can name your own rate (in 15-min increments).

~~~
michaelochurch
What percentage do you take? What levels do you think the market will reach
for, say, qualified mentors in <X>?

When you get real numbers, there's a lot you could do with this data. For
example, if Ruby tutors make 20% more than Python tutors, there's an economic
signal there. While the raw data might seem limited in use, there are a lot of
open questions about the programming economy that one could start answering.

Especially powerful would be to capture code from remote pairing sessions and
get some quality-labelled samples (labels by tutor price level) and perhaps
(many years later) attack the automated code-quality assessment problem (on
which well-labelled data is very rare).

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keesj
I asked for someone to build this kind of service earlier today. Pretty cool
to now see it already exists. Looking forward trying it out.

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angelohuang
I would say machine learning & cloud need more expertise coaching than just
programing languages.

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fxtentacle
i wonder what happened to real programmers working on real problems...

like programming embedded systems in C++

like writing enterprise software in Java

I agree those are less sexy than RoR + HTML5 + CSS3, but still commercial
software is a huge market.

~~~
checker659
Whoa! Where did 'writing enterprise software in Java' come from? Didn't see
that coming!

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sebkomianos
Hate to be off-topic but does anyone know how the Sublime Text theme they are
using is called?

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joemellin
I am one of the first users of airpair :) Great service!

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chx
hrm, co-dementor. interesting choice of name ;)

~~~
csense
I had the exact same thought! I just finished reading Harry Potter and the
Methods of Rationality [1] and Harry Potter and the Natural 20 [2], so at
least I have an excuse.

[1]
[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)

[2] [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-
the-N...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-
Natural-20)

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edwardliu
Great stuff! I could use something like this :)

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hoodoof
Great idea.

