Working with a mentor on your first EA: boundaries that help

[FXS London Scalper]

When starting to write EAs, help from an experienced coder is valuable. Agreeing on boundaries early helps both sides.

Boundaries that tend to work:

• The mentor reviews code; they don't write it. You learn more and own the result.
• Questions collected and sent once a week, not drip-fed.
• The strategy logic stays yours. The mentor comments on code quality, error handling and testing, not on whether the idea will make money.
• Every review ends with one or two concrete things to fix.

Good questions to ask a mentor:

• How should the EA handle a restart with open positions?
• Where should I check return codes, and what do I do with errors?
• How do I log enough to understand a bad trade later?
• How do I structure the code so the strategy can change without rewriting everything?

Questions to avoid: "Is this profitable?" Nobody can answer that from code.

Has anyone here mentored or been mentored on MQL? What worked?