One of the things I enjoy the most about working on software development teams is the mentoring part. I really do enjoy sharing knowledge and teaching what I know to other developers as they grow in their craft.

With a surplus of new developers from bootcamps, online courses, traditional universities, and other paths to software development; mentoring will be important. Maybe the most important.

Of course, in order for the mentorship to work well, it has to be the right person.

Finding the right person is tricky. Do you hire based on skill? What about character? No one wants to work with a jerk. Maybe it’s a combination of both? As someone that has been on the hiring side of this, I can attest that hiring is hard. And hiring the wrong person is easy.

So I set out to build a tool to help with this. Brilliantly named by a friend as Rockstar Ninja.

I hope to have this done by the end of the year. Still designing the UI and flows through the application.

Here is a summary of what it will solve.

Given a candidate that you are considering, it will pull in their commit data from Github and start tracking their commits. By placing commits in a graph and using a scoring algorithm, you can watch a candidate improve over time.

Many times when I was hiring, a candidate just wasn’t ready yet. There should be a way to revisit a candidate and see how they have improved. If they are ready to take a chance on yet.

There is more. Actually, there is a pretty long road map. But I’m concentrating on getting this first version out. There is a growing need to fix hiring, and I think Rockstar Ninja can really help.