I want you to be delighted with this service. If this isn't working for you, I offer a full money back guarantee.

Why Mentoring?

It feels good to have ten thousand ideas. You only make progress on the ones you work until they're done.

You've got a project list, writing a Kubernetes operator, learning Terraform, getting to grips with shell scripting. You know that the materials are all free and online, and somehow that makes it worse because there's nothing stopping you except you.

Ask a model for a reframing, the next thing you know, you're researching projects instead of finishing your goal.

Michael, an engineer I worked with, was honest with me: he needed someone pointing him back to his goals every two weeks, until he learned the habit of managing daily distractions against his long term goals.

That's what I do. You tell me what you're building. We write it down. I come back and ask about it. As you're learning to stay on track, you've also got an infrastructure and software engineer in the room with you, helping you learn how to learn effectively. I don't hand you the answer; an LLM can do that, and you'll forget it. What you get is a friendly, experienced person helping you learn and stay on track, until you can do it without me.

How it Works

reliability is the result of habits, good habits that are informed by a clear understanding of the principles of our tools.

An Evening with Berferd newsletter

We'll work together over video chat.

Before your first session, we'll meet for thirty minutes. We'll talk about your project, understand what goals you're working towards and get them right-sized so you know what you can achieve in a week.

We'll meet for an hour. I'll remind you of your goal, and we'll work on it together, learning and solving problems.

Then it's your time until we meet again, with a twist: we'll agree on a way for you to keep in touch in between sessions, a way that works for you. It'll be a light touch, so you know you're staying on track with your goal or to help you identify what's blocking you. Then we'll meet again, one or two weeks later.

Questions? Send them my way

Feeling unsure? Get in touch and ask to meet. You'll get a free 30 minutes of my time.

If you are unsatisfied, if this isn't working for you, I offer a full money back guarantee.

Bio

I'm Gwendolyn James. I've been working professionally with linux and infrastructure since 2004, from small startups self-hosting on hand-built systems to Fortune 500 companies such as Oracle and Workday, from Megabytes to Petabytes. I was a self-taught Principal Engineer at a rocket engine factory, where I built and designed production and its deployments as a solo infrastructure engineer. I didn't want to be paged nights and weekends: it was two years before we had our first infrastructure-related issue.

Through all this, my passion has been helping my peers grow into excellent, self-disciplined engineers.

I work in classic data centre infrastructure, I work in cloud infrastructure; I work on build systems and write build jobs; I work in Kubernetes and with Terraform; I write shell scripts, go programs, python.

Michael, who I worked with, was newly Staff at a company without a real agreement about what staff meant. His lead couldn't say what was supposed to be different now. We met every two weeks. I helped him learn Staff Engineer level discipline and habits, and also showed him new tools along the way.

Gwyn, you have changed the way that I work and what I know I can achieve. — Michael R., Staff Engineer