Beyond Distance: How We Made Remote Mentoring a Success
summary
SoftwareMill Academy trains junior engineers remotely and succeeds: two editions, 3 months per edition, 4 mentees, 2 mentors, teaching Scala with the Typelevel stack, gRPC for sync calls and Kafka and Mongo/Postgres for async and storage. Curriculum mixes Scala Basics, deep functional-programming lectures with live exercises, pair programming, strict code reviews using Conventional Comments and micro-lectures, Dockerized builds and DevOps Academy–provided deployment. No loyalty contracts, hires as regular employees, and placement on client projects after three months proves the model financially viable.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to remote mentoring
- 4:02Why we started Scala Academy
- 11:08Training structure and goals
- 17:28Daily work and pair programming
- 20:20Mentoring approach and code reviews
- 27:00Challenges with mentors and time
- 31:55Infrastructure and post-academy support
- 33:45Results and future plans
- 36:11Q&A and feedback
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