Online Mentoring

The better part of three decades ago, I was a UNIX geek in Calgary, Alberta, with a couple of part-time jobs — CS adjunct professor at a local junior college, and running my own software consulting/training company. I was stuck on a C Programming language question related to an email server I was trying to set up for a UNIX users’ group. Email wasn’t a “thing” yet except for DARPA and universities. Sergei Brin had just started high school; we were still a decade away from Google and cell phones. Even if you had email access and you knew the other person you wanted to communicate with had email access, unless you knew *exactly* what their email address was, you were SOL.

I had a well-worn copy of Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language,” which was the textbook I chose to teach Data Structures at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. I was fifteen years younger than one of my students, but that didn’t matter — I had a CS degree from a California university, and had been programming for more than half my life at that point. Both went a long way to establishing my credibility in Canada where this type of technology was much newer.