A few years ago, while working as an engineer and building products in a small team, it was surprisingly hard to get practical, unbiased advice from people who had “been there before”. Conference talks and blog posts were too generic, internal mentors were too busy, and paid coaching didn’t scale for early-career engineers or folks outside the US. Yet questions like “How do I design this service?”, “Is my promotion packet strong?” or “How do I move from IC to EM?” come up every week and often decide someone’s trajectory.
ADPList tries to solve this by making it trivial to talk to engineers who have already solved your problem. You browse mentors by stack, company, and topics (e.g. distributed systems, infra, security, data), see their calendars, and book a free session in a couple of clicks. Each session is a video call with notes, resources, and follow‑ups all in one place, so you don’t have to chase links or context across tools. Mentors include senior and staff engineers, EMs, and tech leads from companies like Workday, Swiggy, and others, many of whom run sessions specifically titled “Your career as a software engineer”.
Under the hood, most of the work has gone into scheduling and reliability. Time zones, rescheduling, and no‑shows are handled automatically, with reminders and calendar integrations so both sides actually show up. We’ve also focused on making discovery fast for engineers: instead of browsing marketing pages, you land on human profiles with tech stacks, years of experience, and availability, so you can get from “I need help with my backend design” to “I’m on a call with someone who’s built this before” in minutes. For mentors, there are tools to manage demand, set boundaries, and keep track of mentees over time, since many use ADPList as their main way to give back to the community.
What’s different from typical coaching platforms is that sessions are free for mentees and mentors opt in because they care about teaching and community, not hourly rates. That means quality can be uneven, so we’ve invested in public reviews, transparent profiles, and the ability to try multiple mentors until you find a good fit. The long‑term goal is a global, open mentorship graph where any engineer can find someone a few steps ahead of them, regardless of location or income.
Would love feedback from this community on:
What would make this more useful for you as an developers or EM (APIs, OSS hooks, company accounts)?
What data/controls you’d want if you brought ADPList into your team as an internal mentoring layer.
If you’re curious, you can explore mentors and book a session here: https://adplist.org/