I am Looking for a PHP Mentor

[Whitney Yiu]

Hi all!

Happy new year! I am looking for a PHP mentor to help me structure/organize my PHP learning. Up until this point, it has been a bunch of googling and reading tutorials that may or may not be up to date. I am on the php-mentoring.org site, but have not had much luck thus far. I also am working on a small personal web application as part of my self-teaching process. My goal is to learn enough PHP so that I can start doing freelance or volunteer development work, and/or contribute to open source projects at a junior developer level. 

If you are interested in helping me out, please let me know.

What I am looking for in a mentor:

• Structure/guidance on what to learn/focus on (foundational PHP concepts, OOP, frameworks, APIs, ??)
• Help sifting through what is good PHP coding practice vs. what is outdated and/or wrong
• A Code reviewer
• Any help with learning about design patterns and where/when to use them
• Willing to do "homework", so if you know of coding problems/exercises that can help me learn, that would be awesome!
• Someone to bounce questions off of (especially dumb ones!)
• Someone with professional PHP experience would be great!

Logistics:

• Since I have a full-time job, my availability is nights and weekends
• Skype, e-mail, slack, and/or meeting up at a coffee shop/bar/park/restaurant are all fine with me!
• Whatever time you have available is perfect. I know everyone is busy, so I am not requesting for a lot of time.
• Anywhere in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria is preferred for meeting up, but I can swing into DC if needed (not as frequently, though)

A little about myself: 

My name is Whitney Yiu. I have been attending the DC PHP Meetup for a couple of years now, so you probably know my face, if not my name. I am a .NET developer (I know, I know...the dark side....), but am very interested in learning PHP. I live in Virginia, play soccer, and have gotten into a love/hate relationship with politics since I moved to the DC area.