People to follow to learn the art of teaching dev | Hacker News Reader

People to follow to learn the art of teaching dev

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54 pointsfullofdev13 comments

This is missing two important names: John Lindquist who is the godfather of bite sized educational videos at egghead and Jeffrey Way, the tutsplus OG who brought a great attitude and teaching style to this space and is now running Laracasts.

https://m.youtube.com/c/johnlindquist https://laracasts.com/

You beat me to this comment. I wholeheartedly agree with you, no one like John Lindquist and Jeffrey Way.

If you really enjoy great teachers, gotta watch and learn from the best, and there's no better testament than John Lindquist's PatternCraft series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8B19C3040F6381A2

I have fond memories of Jeffrey Way back in the TutsPlus era when he cemented himself as one of the greatest (modern) tech teachers of our time.

Wow! thanks for pointing both of them. I especially learned for months in laracasts and happy to see how it grows now. WIll definitely add both of them to the list

Thanks!

Effective teaching requires two way communication, especially in a complex field like software development. Those are nice information sources, but I don't think they have much to do with being a good teacher, but they can teach you a lot about content creation.

Some will come and say "school is mostly one way!", but they are wrong, every school I know of has tests and those tests are checked by teaches, that part is necessary to teach, not the testing but the feedback loop, if you have any other way of providing effective feedback that works as well. Without that step we say the person self learned instead of was being taught.

In software engineering we mostly do this via code reviews, that way we systematically make engineers provide feedback to each other and it helps junior programmers learn effectively.

I was just thinking about this.

In a few areas such as competitive programming, the path to improvement can be meteoric.

There’s a natural feedback loop. You first attempt to solve the problem, then viewing other’s solution provides you with critical feedback to reassess and learn from the experience.

Outside of this narrow competitive niche however, it’s difficult to find a consistent source of feedback. (Other than manual code review as you mentioned). Finding a way to fill this need will surely improve the field as a whole.

> Finding a way to fill this need will surely improve the field as a whole.

<ChatGPT entered the chat.>

You: "hey chatgpt, how good is this code?"

GPT: "According to all the GitHub repos and StackOverflow answers I ingested, most developers would rewrite it like this: [...]"

You: "... most developers are morons."

that's a very good opinion Jensson. Thanks. It's indeed a very important point to raise that mostly content (blog/videos) is one way.

Bug I guess in a way, since I'm the "student" of them, I guess we can count it as my "feedback" to them, as I'm enjoying and can digest their teaching.

surprised to see me here, i dont really consider myself a good teacher haha. but happy to encourage others to get into it.

when one teaches, two learn.

when one teaches, two learn

This is mostly true for peer-to-peer teaching, but it's not necessarily true when the teacher and student have different goals, or when there's a huge gap in skill level.

> when there's a huge gap in skill level

That's challenging for the teacher, who can learn to teach better.

Not many can put the most esoteric ideas into simple terms like Feynman, but we can aspire to.

Hi Shawn, I love reading your content. Maybe "teacher" is a heavy word to use. But I definitely enjoy how you deliver things, and more importantly I take action from it. Thanks!

I think you missed to include Julia Evans. She has wonderful content and her zines teaches even complex topics simplistically.

https://jvns.ca/

Thanks for pointing her out. Will add her to the list. I often see unique form of delivering content in twitter.

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