[Vanderson]

I also just had my first intern. But I also taught at the college level and have had a few employees. A few suggestions to add to the already good lists here.

1. Tell them _why_ you do something.

This helps with cognitive load while learning, and helps them overcome some mental stress when investing in new techniques/methods.

2. Provide real code examples that work, and demonstrate them.

This is analogous to hearing a song played when learning to play a musical instrument. It's really hard to convert notes to music without knowing how it is supposed to sound first.

3. Be patient and ready to describe things from multiple angles.

I noticed I was more patient with people I have little time with. The more time you spend with someone the harder this gets. So be prepared for this.

4. You are likely to be wrong, be ready to learn yourself.

Every class I taught something slightly off, or made a mistake, or simply a student had learned some obscure thing from the internet that I had not learned myself. I learned alot by teaching others, but also by screwing up in front of an entire class. Be humble, expect to be wrong from day one, and be grateful when you are taught something new from anyone from any skill level.

Note: knowledge is easily attained these days, understanding why you use one thing and not another is not as easily learned. When an old experienced codger on the internet say to do something a certain way, take it really seriously and study why, then you can pass this on as well.

[moveax]

Nice additions.

I am self-tought and i made the experience that being wrong helped me to evolve. I guess i grinded the gears of many people in bulletin boards or irc channels in the moment i came by with my naive solutions.

But getting corrections and new insights helped me to grow. This is something i want to transfer to my trainee aswell.

I'm thankful for your thoughts :)

[Vanderson]

I would also add that it's important to learn that what you are teaching now may be considered an anti-pattern down the road. Or that the framework de jour is going to become tech debt in 5 years.

So it's really important to distinguish between long term viable fundamental skills/techniques from current best practices.

A specific example of this is I started using javascript a lot, then Prototype.js then jQuery came out (which did not litter the core objects with protoype inheritances, which is better...) and now back to vanilla js now that the browser incompatibilities are minimal. The only long term viable skill here is coding in general, and vanilla js, everything else was a fad of sorts.

Have fun teaching, I really enjoy this part of my work.