Mentors at The Academy are working operators who run real sites.

We don't have teachers or trainers. We have people who ship things. The mentor on your cohort is responsible for the project you'll work on — so when you ship, your work goes into something they care about.

Current mentors

K

Kali

Mentor — Cohort 1 (County Carlow on localnews.ie)

Founder of Built In Ireland and the operator behind a portfolio of around fifty Irish sites — localnews.ie, myid.ie, pubhub.ie, ourhouse.ie, campers.ie, tantra.ie, rural.ie, builtinireland.ie and others. The work runs on a stack of Python pipelines, static HTML, and a deliberately small set of moving parts. Cohort 1's project (Carlow on localnews.ie) is genuinely needed work, not training material.

More about Kali →

Adding more mentors

One mentor per cohort, for now. As cohorts finish and graduates become available, some of them will mentor the next cohort — that's how Herizon's collective grew and we'll borrow the same trick.

If you operate an Irish site or product and you'd be interested in mentoring a future cohort that adopts your work as its project, drop us a line at hello@theacademy.ie. We'd love to hear from you.

What a mentor actually does

Mentoring a cohort is not a teaching role. The mentor:

Mentor load is around two to three hours a week for four weeks per cohort. The mentor's site or project benefits from the shipped work; the mentor's name appears on the reference letter; the cohort gets meaningful help from someone who knows the territory.