Don’t teach in the void
A few months ago I read the book “The Effective Engineer” by Edmond Lau. One of the topics that the author covers is “leverage”, and that effective engineers spend time on the work with the highest leverage. Leverage, was effectively defined as return on investment - so whilst this advice wasn’t ground-breaking, the author gave some good examples of high-leverage activities in the typical engineering job. The examples ranged from the more obvious “automate that manual thing you keep doing”, to the less obvious “help interview candidates because it helps expand your team (and the knock-on effects of that)”
Mentoring or teaching your craft is another example of a high-leverage activity. It makes the rest of your team more effective since you become less of a bottleneck, and those that you mentor can learn from and skip your mistakes (to go on and make entirely new ground-breaking mistakes of their own). This was something I had internalized a while back - however, I fell into a common trap - I did my teaching in the void. In other words, most of my mentoring or technical teaching was me, my protégé, and either a whiteboard or just our words. When another opportunity came along to teach the same thing, I repeated the process. What I should have been doing was writing it down, recording it, refining it, and then sharing it. That is higher leverage. That is not to say I never wrote anything down. I have done my share of wikis, deep-dives, lunch and learn sessions, but it hasn’t been a habit. This is now changing, and a recent happening spurred this on…
I was contacted by one of my cousins back in South Africa. He wants to build a website and needed some pointers to get going. It would be his first foray into the tech space. We had a couple of discussions on WhatsApp, a phone call and a Discord screen share where I tried to walk through some of the foundational concepts involved with website building. To cut a long story a bit shorter, I ended up typing out some instructions, a tutorial if you will, on installing, configuring, and testing a PHP dev environment to get him going. As I did this, I thought “well wouldn’t it be nice to share this - it only needs a little editing”. With that, I published PHP Development on Windows - go check it out!
A brief aside, you may notice that the tutorial is on a different blog. I like things being compartmentalized and my vision for this blog was never for step-by-step tutorials. So I am giving Hashnode a try for that (it is entirely free, use my referral link to join!) and will publish all step-by-step tutorials there.
To conclude, don’t teach in the void. If it stuff internal to your company, place it on an internal site or internal wiki for other employees to learn from. It is high leverage, you practice your writing, and your mentoring and teaching reaches more people.
Happy writing.
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