Without a mentor, your work will be largely ignored and treated like worthless garbage for years. On the other hand, being associated with a mentor who is well

Without a mentor, your work will be largely ignored and treated like worthless garbage for years. On the other hand, being associated with a mentor who is well known in the industry will mean that your work can easily gain traction, even if it is mediocre. Having worked on open source projects for almost 10 years, I've come to the conclusion that hype is never a good thing. Hype just gives users a false sense of confidence, gives you a false sense of accomplishment/optimism and hinders real progress. So in reality, I think that you don't really need a mentor. 'Mentors' are only really useful for PR/promotion when you're already skilled and have already done the hard work. I'm kind of a 'mentor' myself right now so I'm not saying this out of spite. I just don't have any illusions about my true purpose. There are plenty of severely undervalued developers out there who don't really need any mentoring; they just need someone to help their projects get the traction it deserves.