Mentoring at Poland Technology Grant
I’m not the easiest person to reach by phone. If I haven’t lost it somewhere and the battery isn’t dead yet, it’s most likely in Do Not Disturb mode, lying in some random place like a kitchen cupboard or the trunk of my car.
I use it as my alarm in the morning, so it sometimes happens that I pick it up thinking I’m hitting the “snooze” option. Then I’m surprised that my alarm talks to me. Or that it has a name attached to it.
It was one of those early-morning, 9 AM calls that started one of my most exciting IT adventures. The excitement of the caller didn’t match my “are you seriously calling people at sunrise?” vibe, but eventually I caught up and registered the words “budget”, “charity”, and “scholarship” before I went back to bed.
That’s how my involvement in Poland Technology Grant started. It’s a scholarship programme for young people studying IT and related subjects who face financial or social barriers. Initiated and funded by Relativity and organised by Fundacja Sarigato through Hakersi , it combines financial support with access to mentoring.
From November 2025 till July 2026, I had the pleasure of working with five mentees, doing my best to help them take their first steps in the IT world. We had about fifty mentoring sessions and a few in-person meetings, built a WordPress website pro bono for another charity, and, most importantly, had tons of fun exploring different tech-related topics.
Over the rainbow
And varied topics they were. There were university assignments like C or Java projects. We explored infrastructure challenges for Python pipelines running on an AGH supercomputer and prepared for first job interviews.
But tech ain’t just typing green letters on a black screen. It’s also figuring out what to do, what things to learn, what concepts to chase. Which area to focus on to find the dream job, and the pros and cons of taking a full-time job versus building your own business.
We also brainstormed what things to ignore. How do you stay focused in the noise-hole of 2025/2026 AI craziness, with the constant FOMO accompanying anyone trying to find their way through the madness of new models and tools every day?
I asked one of the mentees to put all the things he wanted, needed, or had to do in an Excel sheet so we could somehow get a grasp of them. The next week he came back with a list of over 100 rows, with all the mindbuggers from learning Windows automation to fixing the leaking roof. Tons of fun.
Shut up and listen
Most of the value in the meetings came from me doing nothing. Being there, asking some questions from time to time, and leaving space for the mentee to figure out their own answer.
Very often I’d recognise a situation from my experience and think: yeah, I don’t believe you’re going anywhere with this idea, dude. Yet I knew that if I were the one figuring out the solution in my twenties, I wouldn’t listen anyway. So it took effort to sit back and help develop an experiment they could use to test that idea with as little harm as possible.
We all learn in different ways, and accepting other people’s ways of learning was a big part of this. It pushed me out of my comfort zone quite early, as I was never a university kind of guy. Structured lessons, the overhead of classes I thought were useless taking time away from the valuable ones. It never seemed like an idea worth exploring. Yet there are folks who benefit from the structure, the schedule, and the variety of topics covered.
Taking bits of my experience, mixing them with a mentee’s point of view, and moulding them into this strange Frankenstein of a working solution felt like a great use of my time.
The best, and often surprising, part usually came at the next meeting. Hearing what they’d tried after our conversation, what helped, what they did differently. Some crap I’d struggled with years ago was finally useful to someone else.
Out of the bubble
The adventure also amazed me with the gap between the bubble I live in and other people’s everyday experience. I’d been using AI tools regularly since GPT-3.5, and by the time the mentoring started, I’d already been using Claude Code as my main coding tool. I was sure everyone knew it. Especially students at technical universities.
Yet I was the one showing them that we don’t need to copy and paste problems and solutions from one window to another, like we did when Stack Overflow was still a thing. Even asking AI to explain a topic, do in-depth research, or challenge an idea turned out not to be obvious to others.
I appreciated some of the theory they’d learned at university. Knowing basic programming concepts and the constraints of the tech we worked with made it easier to introduce automation and abstractions, and avoid shooting ourselves in the foot with AI-generated code.
On the other hand, the creativity that came with not knowing those “rules” gave amazing results. One of the mentees came back a week after I showed him Claude Code with a working web app that generated 3D models of Minecraft structures in the browser. It worked flawlessly when I tried it. The user experience was pleasant: I could rotate, scale, and move the models around, and apply textures. Not a single performance glitch or strange visual.
Of course, we had no idea how the app worked. It had no tests, no SOLID, no linters. But it was fun, and it allowed us to play and explore new concepts.
All together now
The great thing about the programme was the community around it. When one participant needed help with maths, he was connected with a volunteer at the charity who could help him. At one point, Relativity brought us all together for a full day at their office, where everyone could talk with people working in security, design, HR, engineering management, and product ownership. We had an online workshop with Przemek from 10xDevs (referral link) , who shared his experience of learning and answered tons of mentees’ questions.
There was real value in people meeting each other. Talking with someone who was at your career stage some time ago is a completely different experience from finding your way alongside someone who’s at the same stage, with a similar background and similar struggles. I have no idea which connections will last, but creating the opportunity for them to start is what mattered.
What’s next?
When I talk to people about mentoring, I often hear two concerns: it will take too much time, or they don’t know enough to help.
The time commitment is kinda real. True, you need to arrange the meetings and attend them. But that was it for these sessions. I didn’t do any preparation for the calls: no plans, presentations, coding exercises, or anything like that. I simply created a calendar for people to book meetings, sent a weekly reminder to do so, then joined and learned with them as we figured out solutions to whatever problems they brought in.
When I started working with Hakersi, I spent a few months teaching 13- and 14-year-olds to build websites. For the first classes, I came with a plan, learning objectives, materials, all that blah-blah. I tossed it all away the moment I saw them for the first time.
We already have classes with a plan. They’re called “school”, and no sane teenager gets excited about them. For the older ones, we came up with the concept of “lectures”. Every student loves them.
So, if you think you don’t know enough to help someone, remember your beloved history or algebra teachers. Knowing something doesn’t automatically make someone worth listening to. A plan and a pile of knowledge don’t guarantee anyone learns a single thing.
There’s plenty of room to do something useful already. If you’ve spent a year in IT, you have something to share with someone trying to get their first job. If you’ve finished university, you can help someone wondering whether to go. You don’t need fifteen years of experience to offer an hour to someone facing a problem you’ve already been through.
Take that problem and figure it out together. Ask questions, listen, break things. Sharing knowledge is a skill you develop by doing it, and your first attempt doesn’t have to be a masterpiece to help someone. If you’re waiting to “know enough”, then you’ll die before you can help anyone.