Vets Who Code

That is true for me as well; and to make it worse I do about 10% of my work in the veterinary space. I was very excited for a second.

It's about veterans, for anyone else wandering around the comments and also expecting veterinarian like I was

Hey, really appreciate you taking the time to ask — and even more so for being open to mentoring. Twenty years in the game is serious, and folks like you are exactly who our troops need.

To answer your questions: 1. What mentors do Mentors help guide our troops through the learning and career process. That includes reviewing code, offering feedback, sharing your experience, and helping them get unstuck when they hit a wall. It’s not about having all the answers — it’s about being consistent, showing up, and being real with folks trying to break in. 2. Time commitment + 1:1s We aim for one 1:1 per month per troop, but we’re flexible. Most mentors give about 1–2 hours a week, including async stuff like reviewing PRs or replying in Slack. If you only have 30 minutes, we’ll work with that. We respect your time and want this to be something sustainable.

If you’re down to talk more or need anything else cleared up, hit me up directly. Would love to have you on board.

I don't mind the design, but it looks a little military. Some puppies and kittens might better play into the vet vibe.

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This joke passes the veteran vibe check. Only someone who is a vet or close to them would say something so inappropriate and funny.

Thanks for this. I've been dabbling with code for ~20 years, have the diploma and the t-shirt, but I lack the mentorship. I feel like it would be even more helpful in this time as I attempt to pivot from my general-IT career with dev as one tool into solely development. So, anyways, thanks for sharing additional resources.

The trouble is that outside things like CYBERCOM and the NSA, it's hard to pitch a use case for people in uniform to be slinging code. If anything, that just makes cybersecurity/counterintelligence harder, because you have a bunch of those bro-level apps running around, potentially poorly-built and secured by amateur coders. There's not much more justification for people in uniform building software tools than there is having them design and build artillery guns or transport jets. Better to buy those from industry and train folks in uniform to use them.

I don't disagree with how horrible a lot of DOD software is, but that's more an artifact of the broken military procurement process combined with the often-childish attitudes people in tech have about working with the military.

The military could fix this internally if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who can write good code and don't mind doing push-ups and going to the range as well.

Dotgov is a lot harder. Salaries are artificially capped very low, and even one of these horrific contracting body shops will pay you 30% more than you'd make in the government, and you don't need to deal with all the bullshit that comes with working for the government.

Oh they definitely have, and likely continue to re-evaluate periodically. They've even done a lot of tests and such to determine feasibility. Unfortunately the costs tend to balloon when done internally, and the quality is not necessarily better.

A friend of mine was a uniformed programmer back when the Marine Corps had an MOS for that. He got out shortly after 9/11 and went on to become a Software Architect in the federal government. He actually has a very negative opinion of the concept of service member software engineers. I think his perspective is colored by his experience working for a Staff Sergeant who lat-moved into their MOS and was just completely useless as a programmer and by extension as a Team Lead or "Senior" Software Engineer. But the Marine Corps is notorious for abysmal Talent Management so YMMV...

Judging by the number of these comments, there could be a similarly large market for Veterinarians Who Code

Took me way too long to realize this

Veteran veterinarians?

I don't disagree, but I do think it's worth considering this is a non-profit and the service is free. When offering such things you gotta be ruthlessly efficient with your time/effort. I would further bet that most of the target market aren't going to be dissuaded by the somewhat-sloppiness of the website.

Everybody has access to a phenomenal, state of the art neural network -- it lies between their ears and sadly goes underused much of the time.

Even if you use the electronic sort of NN, at best those are only good at serving as thought-provocation or inspiration for the one the good Lord gave you.