Junior developer here, seeking a mentor

Question

Ive been passionate about CS for a couple years now, programming/learning just about every day. Im trying to go to college and major in CS. Shooting for MIT or Harvard. I use Arch Linux as a daily driver which gives me a lot of XP just from it being super DIY.Most of my experience is with Python, Bash, HTML, CSS/SCSS. I am starting to learn low-level systems languages like C and Rust, with a focus on Rust. Im also getting myself familiar with relational databases. I'm still getting a feel for what I actually want to do, so I experiment a lot, just like to learn how stuff works.I personally haven't met anyone IRL that is interested in programming or tech in general, so I've kind of been going about it by myself. It would be awesome to meet people who know more about it than me, and bounce ideas back and forth and learn from them. Would also love to contribute to a project, my github contributions are pretty low and it would be good XP.

FloatArtifact · Accepted Answer

I volunteer supporting some open source projects for accessibility.I would enjoy getting to get to know you a little and if there's something of interest you'd like contribute you'd be welcome. Reach out at 1mexjte78@relay.firefox.com

meiraleal · Answer

Your best bet is to join some discord of interesting programming tools or communities you like and start following the technical conversations, ask questions, reply the ones you can help.

Nextgrid · Answer

One of the things that helped me back in the day was installing and running Arch Linux for some time. While it's not programming per se, it gave me the terminal/shell/sysadmin skills I needed in my programming career.If you have time and don't already have good UNIX skills I highly recommend it. Do it on "hard" mode though, no shortcuts. I'm sure there are scripts out there to install Arch easily, don't go for them - do it by hand!