How I Became A Udacity Mentor
Tags: udacity, mentor, cloudnative
Published: 2021-03-29 09:59:00

---
title: How I Became A Udacity Mentor
published: true
date: 2021-01-03 21:56:38 UTC
tags: udacity, mentor, cloudnative
canonical_url: https://blog.mphomphego.co.za/blog/2021/01/03/How-I-became-a-Udacity-Mentor.html
---

![](https://blog.mphomphego.co.za/assets/2021-01-03-How-I-became-a-Udacity-Mentor.png)

# The Story

Last December, I was awarded an opportunity to become a [Udacity Mentor & Project Reviewer](https://www.udacity.com/start-mentoring). This started as an interest to me while I was working on my 3rd Udacity nanodegree, one of the motivations for me to apply was the idea of learning from other individuals and disseminating what I have already learned.

This is my first post of 2021, I want to give you some insights on how I landed the role and a brief overview of the program I reviewed.

# The How

It was mid-November 2020 when I received a [Slack](https://slack.com/) message from the Udacity Alumni channel about a few opportunities for Mentors for new programs being introduced in 2021. Before we go on, I'd like to point out some of the benefits of becoming a Udacity Mentor that motivated me.

**But, what does it mean for me to become a Udacity Mentor?**

- Through-out my life, I have come to understand that the sole purpose of life is to pass on what you have learned and,
- This opportunity will help me create relationships and network with people from different parts of the world.
- Most importantly get to help, guide and motivate other aspiring learners while,
- Gaining valuable communication, teaching and leadership skills and most importantly people skills.

---

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7910856/103517747-4de92100-4e7b-11eb-839f-2b4b7319323c.png)


So, as I mentioned Udacity was looking for mentors that would help guide and review projects for upcoming programs and one of those programs interested me; After applying I received and completed the *situational* and *technical assessment* to verify my skills.
My application was successful and I was accepted to become a mentor on a new program **"Cloud Native Architecture Nanodegree Program"**. This meant that I was one of the few people that had access to the beta version of the course and I could review the course while giving valuable feedback on the content and projects. 

But before that could happen, I needed to complete and graduate from their onboarding Udacity Mentorship Nanodegree Program. The course gives you a better understanding of what it is like to work as a Udacity Mentor and learn how to apply various tools and strategies to provide high-quality student support. In the end, you are assessed on your understanding of course materials through both multiple-choice/short-answer tests and projects where you are asked to apply what you've learned in the courses to real-life examples of student questions and project reviews. 

That 8 hours course took way longer than I had anticipated... Of course, I had my reasons (Me coming up with excuses!)

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7910856/103512106-dadaad00-4e70-11eb-8555-f9ab8c6d14a5.png)

But finally completed and graduated (**Mic Dropped**):
![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7910856/103513034-7882ac00-4e72-11eb-91d7-9c29fbd0148e.png)

---

So, coming back to the course I am reviewing and you are probably wondering what is the **"Cloud Native Architecture Nanodegree Program"** all about?

**Anyways, about the course**

- The course introduces you to:
    - What [Cloud Native computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_native_computing) is; which can be summarised as an approach to building and running applications that fully exploit the advantages of the cloud computing model and,
    - The [Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)](https://www.cncf.io/)

    I found this video useful, in understanding what Cloud Native is:
<p><div>
<iframe width="100%" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fp9_ubiKqFU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></p>

- It also gives you an in-depth understanding of how to construct a CI/CD pipeline that will containerise an application and deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster; using *Cloud Native* tools such as Python, Git/GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes (Both [minikube](minikube) & [rancher's k3s](https://k3s.io/)), Vagrant and VirtualBox.

- It also offers some of the foundational concepts that would help you understand; 
    - What message passing is? and when to use it.
    - The difference between a [Monolith and Microservice architecture](https://medium.com/koderlabs/introduction-to-monolithic-architecture-and-microservices-architecture-b211a5955c63), the trade-offs and implementing/refactoring these applications.

- Finally an introduction to [Cloud Observability](https://dzone.com/articles/what-is-cloud-native-observability-v-visibility-an) and various tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Elasticsearch (ELK), Logstash and Kibana.

To graduate (which I haven't) there's 2 project one needs to complete:

- [UdaConnect](https://github.com/mmphego/udaconnect): The idea is to refactor the monolithic app into a microservice app while introducing other message-passing techniques such as gRPC and Kafka

    This project has been a tricky one to complete, mostly due to the timeframe they gave us between going through the lessons and completing the project.

- [Building a Metrics Dashboard](https://github.com/mmphego/Cloud-Native-Observability-Metrics-Dash): This project is about creating dashboards that use multiple graphs to monitor an application that is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster.

# Conclusion

This has been a wild ride for me. I personally didn't enjoy my festive as I had to juggle multiple things at the same time. However, I managed to finish off some of the courses and project I was doing towards the end of 2020. Now, I can put my complete (hahaha) focus on the **"Cloud Native Architecture Nanodegree Program"** before they kick me out. So that I can graduate and become a Full-Mentor and project reviewer for the program. 

# Reference

- [Become a Udacity Mentor](https://www.udacity.com/start-mentoring)
- [Udacity Advantage: Mentorship Support and Project Reviews](https://medium.com/udacity-india-inc/udacity-advantage-mentorship-support-and-project-reviews-b4fa840e556c)
- [The mentorship model at Udacity](https://mentorcruise.com/blog/the-mentorship-model-at-udacity-cb11a6b1e894/)
- [On being successful with Udacity](https://medium.com/@MrsDragos/on-being-successful-with-udacity-16553bcb8b52)