Our mistress of mentoring, Katy Dickinson, has just posted a status report on the FY06 SEED mentoring program: “we have 35 of the 71 SEED Engineering Mentoring participants for 2005-2006 matched with mentors.” I’m really proud of the fact that I’m going to be mentoring two of those participants, both based outside the US. As a non-US citizen, based 2700 miles from the company headquarters for all of my 20 years at Sun, I’ve always been especially sensitive to the issues that arise when you’re a remote worker: when your preferred keyboard layout is not “U.S.”; when you have to be able to exert influence without hanging out in the cafeteria in Menlo Park or Santa Clara; when you have to remind people to use fully-qualified domain names in their URLs, because not everybody is in the “.sfbay.sun.com” domain. I hope I can be of use to the folks I’m mentoring this year; I’m also really looking forward to learning from them. For me, mentoring is a two-way street.