Programming

Crucial? Not at all. The only crucial things you need are curiosity, the ability to Google shit, and the understanding that the job is figuring shit out and knowing how to do that, rather than knowing how to do anything in the first place.

I've only had one colleague who does online mentoring, I think he used codementor.io but not 100% sure on that. You gotta realize that in our field good teachers are few and very far between, many of us fit the awkward introvert stereotype well and those who don't have no pedagogical training, that's why blogs and YouTube are the best resources for us. Spending time finding a good mentor is not certain to pay off and has a much higher effort cost than just scrubbing through YouTube for a while until you find a good channel.

As for industry insight, you're mainly gonna be interested in what technologies are hot right now and which are being discarded, again YouTube is fine for doing research here. You can also go to code meetups and just ask around, all the big cities used to have them semi frequently before Covid, don't know if it's back yet, see previous point about googling things.

Broadly speaking, yes, having a mentor is a good idea. However, finding a mentor, a good one, is pretty challenging.

I feel like the pragmatic solution is just to try and find a good team. A good team will provide a learning environment for all of the best practices and technical skills.

There are a few mentor sites, but honestly, I've had pretty hit or miss results with them. You'd likely have to do some trial and error before finding the right fit.

I do not believe having a mentor is necessary, but I wish I'd had one. actually, I still wish I had one sometimes. however, a lot of the things you can get from a mentor can be gleaned from community. this forum, hackernews, friends in the industry, and communicative coworkers can all give you unexpected insights.

I'm now on the other end where I'm training new people so I have a little advice - if you're in a position where you're working on a team, ask for as much help as you can get away with (and be as specific as possible with all of your asks, people like answering simple questions).

Junior dev positions involve a fair bit of on the job training with mentoring from the more senior devs. The harder part is breaking into the industry as a self taught dev.

I wouln't say that it is required to have a mentor. Alas, if you want to do anything serious (other than the odd hobby project) it is important to have someone else look over what you've done and how you've done it, to make sure (or at least increase confidence) that there are no severe bugs or security vulnerabilities that "you just didn't think about". Imo. this feedback could also come from anyone else in a joint open souce project for example - however, it will probably be more concice there whereas as a mentor could give you more of their time.

I started my first web development job a bit later in life than most but attended university rather than being self-taught. When I began working, I had to self teach because the languages I was working with were not much of what I'd learned in school. A few years later we revamped the product and I had to go learn a different stack so again, self-learning on the fly in order to maintain what we had going. I stayed at that place for about 9 years and felt like I was stagnating, plus I was siloed off into my own realm and had no help to rely on aside from what I could find in books or online. I deeply felt I needed mentorship, not from a coding perspective but to catch up with the industry & create a clear career path for the future.

I did eventually receive mentorship through a consultant to work through the next phase. We determined the causes of what I was feeling, coached on some new skills, and I found myself running my own business a few years later to realize a dream which hadn't been fulfilled. Now, several years have passed since that point - during the last year I was forced to dissolve that business because I had to step back to focus on my health instead of continue grinding and growing for my and my family's sake. During that time, I turned to a few trusted contacts for advice and mentorship. The perspective from the outside helped me get through that process and pick up and carry on to the next thing when I felt like a failure.

I share these anecdotes to show examples that there is tremendous value to you to find networking, gather contacts, and turn to people for mentorship and advice wherever you can get it. One thing I learned is that it doesn't matter as much what the hot new framework is or what hosting infrastructure solution the companies are moving to - those things are always going to be caught up in a constant churn cycle. The news sites and communities are going get caught up in hype but it matters more what can be created from the hype than the hype itself. Businesses care most about what keeps their sites cost-efficient, highly available, performing well, and secure day in and day out so they can keep their doors open and the lights on. You will find tools to help you accomplish this and pick up this knowledge through learning from others as you go. Don't just seek out web-related mentorship either. Talk with people in other fields no matter what they may do, you will find knowledge which you can bring back and apply to our field.