It matters who teaches you
33 points by gruberb
33 points by gruberb
I kept thinking of all the teachers, senior engineers, and managers who shaped me into the professional I am today
As I get older, I think about this quite a bit, and try to pass on what I can. I've always wondered where I'd be without the patience of my high school programming teacher, the sage DevOps guy who'd drop by my cubicle during my internship and ask me questions to make me think, the mentor I had from MasterCard during my career transition, and the other experts who gave me help along the way.
I am currently writing the second edition of my book "Rust Web Development". When I approached Manning with the idea
I've always wanted to write a book. I had no idea you could just approach a publisher. What was the path to getting the first book published?
I started writing blog posts about moving from NodeJS to Rust around 2020 I believe. No one was talking about it at the time, so I thought: I want to write a book about it, that's probably going to be very much in demand in a few years time.
I cold emailed Manning and got no response. 9 months later, one person from Manning emailed me, they found my blog posts and suggested a book about Rust and NodeJS. On the first call with Manning I said "Oh, you finally read my E-Mail", and the answer was "Which E-Mail? Must have missed it".
So I had the foresight of the book and was lucky that Manning "found me".
For the 2nd version, since I am already in touch with the publisher and they trust me writing books which sell, I have an easier time sending proposals and talking "internally".
I really like the advice, and the idea behind it.
I never really had teachers that made things click for the stuff i know and use now. University did nothing for my programming skills, except likely slowing me down compared to just having the same time for myself.
I'm a "learber by doing" and for me, LLMs are likely the best teacher, as i can now quickly get unblocked at understanding new concepts. I have a really weird way of thinking, and most people that tried to teach me did it wrong for me.
As someone who learns with a load of really weird analogies + differences to these analogies, most of my one-on-one teachers were more confused with my weird ways of thought.
When i remember back to the first days of programming, i mostly learned from reading thr manuals and toying around, and most tutorials never helped me understand what i've been trying to learn. So i guess this might be the reason i learn well from LLMs: Jumping back and forth between a lot of adjacent topics, having 20 tabs open and feeling less overwhelmed by this than by having a focused one-one-one discussion. And i guess no teacher/mentor wants to have this kind of chaos around them.
tl,dr: I really like working and learning with LLMs due to my own way of thinking, but i do agree with the general idea of the article that who you learn from is important.