How teaching helped me become a better developer

Key Takeaways

hi there my friend and Friends welcome to my podcast General musings my name is Kevin and here at my podcast I talk about whatever is front of mine for me in any given week uh usually in some way or another that's related to front end development though it's because normally what I do is nerd out about CSS and this is sort of my audio only Outlet now that um I'm doing if you've been following the podcast previously it is in its new form now which is going to be a little bit more relaxed a little less formal and more tangential to my newsletter uh rather than being directly I I used to be using my newsletter as a script now it's going to sort of be an expansion upon parts of my newsletter and this week's topic is going to be about how you can step up your learning game or supercharge your learning through teaching and if you've followed me for a little while you might have heard me say this before and if that's the case and you you're like oh whatever I don't want to listen to this again I'm going to be doing it a little bit different uh this time around so maybe stick around uh I want to talk a little bit more about my personal experience with it actually and then we'll sort of circle back around a little bit but before I even get to that I just want to say the reason I'm even mentioning it is because I recently did an interview with Yuna Kravitz and she brought it up or I think I brought it I don't remember who one of us brought up sort of it came along in conversation I don't know but uh in she was talking about how she always recommends to uh boot camp students to start a blog about what they're learning and well she shared a lot of the things I'm going to be saying today are things I've said previously as well one of the things that she said that was a really good point that I didn't think about was that creating a public facing blog or if you do a YouTube channel or if you do a podcast whatever it is a public facing way of doing this teaching over keeping them personal notes and things like that there's a nice potential there to show as a showcase for your potential future employers right uh it shows the skills you've mastered and all these other things in a really nice way and how you can talk in you know if somebody's reading your technical writing and it's good high quality stuff even if it's short blog post you don't have to make these 2,000w long things you just have to describe and explain a concept that you've learned about that's a really good skill to show to potential employers uh so I just want to throw that out there as a secondary benefit another secondary benefit of course is that you can also help other people who are also trying to learn the same thing as you uh so you know you've just learned it there's someone else who's trying to figure that out that means so you're benefiting them it might not be a lot of people when I started my YouTube channel I was happy if I got views on a video for a long time and you might not think so now if you you know if you look at where my YouTube channel is now I'm coming up on 900,000 subscribers I always get you know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of views on a video but I still remember the days when I was half when a video had views early on uh that was exciting right so it doesn't matter if it's two people and the reason I stuck with my YouTube channel is because it didn't matter if no one was watching it because I would have given up on it really early on uh the reason I started my YouTube channel was a selfish one because I wanted to do it for myself and if you start any sort of public facing teaching of any kind I want the primary reason you do it to be a selfish one as well and that might seem a little bit weird but first of all it's going to keep you going and if you're doing it for yourself as the primary thing that's going to keep you motivated to keep going with it probably more than if you're trying to get lots of views and other things like that because as views go up and more people see things and all of that it's just a never ending thing you always want more whereas if you're doing it for yourself uh then you're going to be able to keep up with it and stay motivated with it a lot easier and if you've never done any sort of teaching in any way you're you're going to be amazed by what happens and this is as I said I want to talk a bit about my own experience with this and the way I found out that teaching makes you actually learn a subject better is when I started teaching in the classroom uh at that point i' been making websites for quite a while I'd been doing WordPress development uh a lot of child themes where I was stripping down the CSS and writing completely custom CSS for every project I was doing and i' been I was pretty good at it at that point or I felt very good about it how's that I got to the classroom and I had to teach it and I realized I was able to do things but I didn't really know why or how I guess uh right so it was I could follow these patterns that I've been doing and then these different things that i' learned along the way and I could make these tweaks that I needed to change and other stuff like that but then when a student would be like well you know why does that work because their use case would be a little bit different or there always be these things that would come up in the classroom and good questions and stuff and you're sort of going oh man I don't know because right that's sort of like when your kids ask you why and you say because I'm I'm the teacher I'm the parent that's never do that right um but that's sort of the at the beginning where I'd just be like realizing very quickly that I needed to learn more and get deeper into things so when somebody asked me a question I'd actually have an answer for them uh and some sometimes that would actually happen while I'd be talking out loud to them so I'd be giving a lesson on something and I'd be saying something and I never explained this thing before it could be as simple as like the Box model or something silly right and I'm explaining out loud how the Box model works and I've always knowing this the information's been at the back of my head and that first time saying it out loud all of a sudden I this light bulb would go off in my head as I'm talking out loud to the classroom and make this realization about something that I've done before and understanding how it works and this happened to me so many times it wasn't all it almost every time I'd be explaining a subject for the first time I'd have some sort of light bulb moment it just these connections that you make because all of a sudden you you have to draw into a little bit deeper of a knowledge and try and make sense of something and you just draw out these extra insights that you wouldn't have had if you weren't trying to explain it and obviously I was talking out loud to my class I've had the same thing happen when I'm writing where when you're writing something you have to explain it still and as you're trying to explain it you come across these same realizations sometimes you make connections to things like I said you you realize oh that's why that worked and it's this really cool Insight that you get other times you're trying to explain something and you have no idea how and you realize that you have this knowledge Gap that you didn't know that you had because you know let's say CSS what I know so when I would be doing it I'd be teaching these things and I'd be realizing okay I learned the fundamentals of CSS and then started doing other stuff with it and I never went back to those fundamentals and there's actually holes there's things in those fundamentals I don't understand either the impact of or there'd be holes in the fundamentals that I just things I just didn't know and it seems crazy that I've been writing CSS for years at that point I've been been teaching it and I'd still have these like fundamental gaps in my knowledge and it made me I'd be you know preparing my lesson plan and I'd be like I can't explain that and that that was at the point when I was like realizing that I needed to plan things out a little bit better and know what everything I wanted to talk about and it that that first class when people started asking questions and I had no idea was was a shock to me but I figured things out after that and so I'd be planning them better and yeah I would be like trying I be looking at what I'd be explaining and be like I have no idea and then so I'd be on MDM or watching other YouTube videos and trying to understand why that thing worked the way it did and then it would often be linked to some other you know that knowledge should be built on something else that I didn't know and then I'd realize okay I need to figure that out and that filled in all these cracks and all these gaps that were in my knowledge in this foundational stuff that you think that you know because you've been using a language for whether it's 6 months or two years or 5 years or whatever it is you're filling in all of these holes and then all of a sudden by filling in those holes you've learned that one thing you were trying to get you can explain that but other things start making more sense too and then when you're learning other new things you're building it on top of that really strong Foundation now instead of sort of the rickety one that you had before and it wasn't your fault you had a rickety Foundation before you were doing stuff you were building stuff you felt comfortable with what you were doing and you don't realize that you have holes and it's through trying to explain things that you find those holes and as it then you have that stronger foundation and new things become so much easier you start when you when you start playing around with something you all of a sudden can make these connections because you have that stronger Foundation or you're going to try something really weird right you're like you're trying to solve a problem and that's how you end up making these weird sort of leaps and I'm sure you've seen code pens or examples of stuff other people have done maybe I've even done stuff in YouTube videos like oh that was really clever how do you think of that you think of it these things become a lot more easier to come up with I'll say when you have that really really really strong Foundation because you understand the connection between different things you understand how maybe I can you know take this little thing and twist it in a different way to use it and again I'm getting a little bit repetitive now I apologize for that but just the importance of building that strong Foundation can't be overlooked and the best way to do it is to explain things because it highlights everything it makes you make new connections and it fills in all those cracks in your knowledge so I really would encourage you if you don't have a blog or if you have one that you let die to go and start one back up again and hit me up on Twitter or Mastadon uh with a link and and share it with me if you want me to boost the signal of it a little bit because you know you'd like a few more eyeballs on it but definitely go and do it and do it for selfish reasons because I promise you that if you've never done this before and you've listened to me say it and maybe some other people say it that you know this whole like oh explain things or teach things and it's going to make you better uh understanding of something and it's easy to dismiss it's easy to be lazy about it but it's easily the biggest thing that's changed how I write CSS is by teaching it people ask me how I get how I got really good at CSS and definitely part of it is I've been you know writing it for over a decade now uh I've been teaching it for over a decade now for that fact for that matter so I've been writing it for a really long time and obviously just by writing it for a really long time getting lots and lots of practice over all of that time that's a huge contributing factor that you can't Overlook right you just need to get the in but I also guarantee you that if I never started teaching and I just been writing it this entire time I think I'd still be pretty good at it but I'd be nowhere near as good now or have the knowledge of it that I have now it it is really really powerful and I really encourage you to give it a try um as you're learning new things and it does not have to be these huge in-depth technical articles find you know today I learned you just just don't write the thing you learn though you know whatever it is this is how the Box model works I learned about the Box model don't write that give an explanation on what it is that you learned and how it works if you learned about the you know flexbox stuff or the what collapsing margins are don't just say what they are but explain how they work and just go into a little bit of detail to explain things and it's really going to unlock stuff for you please give it a try uh I'm really hoping I can at Le inspire a couple of people that are listening to this to give it a shot so I'm I'm you know pleading a little bit and getting a little bit repetitive I do apologize for that so I'll end it here because I don't really I don't want to go uh and become uh any more repetitive than I've already been uh so yeah thank you very much for listening I hope you enjoyed this episode if you do have any things like that as I said you've been either a YouTube channel a podcast a Blog anything at all where you are making your stuff available in public and you'd like to share it with me just hit me up on social media and let me know and with that I will let you go so thank you very very much and of course until next time don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome