"I lucked out. My two "seniors" on that first job out of university - John and Ethan - took me under their respective wings. John knew everything about bit-banging the 8085 CPUs we programmed; Ethan had more systems experience - he could make CP/M sing with BIOS calls. I needed the experience of both, and they shared it freely. A good mentor knows when to take the training wheels off the bike"
"Owen had a storied past in Silicon Valley - possibly cutting the world's first mousepad while working at an arts supply store in Palo Alto, before going to work for his hero, Nolan Bushnell. From there, Owen became one of the sysadmins at Hewlett-Packard, setting up all the configuration - both internal and external - for HP.com. Owen told me tales about updating HP's hosts file by hand every week to accommodate a growing internet."
A novice programmer entered a professional software role after experience with BASIC, Z80 assembler, floppy drives, and a disk operating system. Two senior engineers provided hands-on mentorship: one on low-level CPU programming and the other on system-level CP/M and BIOS calls. Those lessons established essential professional software engineering practices and sustained a career. Later leadership roles revealed limits in patience and mentoring ability. Co-creation of VRML required mentoring a wider community, and an experienced mentor from Silicon Valley provided guidance. That mentor brought systems and operational expertise from work at Hewlett-Packard and early internet-era host-file management.
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