Welcome, my first post!

I don't like saying what I am good at, it makes me uncomfortable, I am aware this makes for terrible salary negotiations, crippling modesty will prevent me from listing too many things but one thing I do think I am good at is mentoring/coaching, so much so I do it in my spare time, I enjoy it. I have been making websites with varying degrees of success for over a decade and I have learnt many things along the way which I am happy to share with others.

I enjoy helping people understand complex stuff. I see it as my responsibility to be able to effectively explain a concept, if I can't explain what's going on then I clearly don't understand the topic, stripping away jargon and using analogies to convey a topic feels amazing when the other person has an "aha" moment. I have had positive professional feedback, and informal feedback about this skill many times. I like to see it as a compassionate way to teach, I mostly did teaching in the past through a charity organisation called codebar once every two weeks to under-represented groups in tech.

We have a coaching guide at codebar, which we give to first-time coaches, but will often point seasoned coaches to it just as a reminder, one of the many points is "Assume that anyone you're teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence." It's my favourite recommendation. I constantly to remind myself of this, just because it feels like the right thing to do when teaching something, especially when the concept is hard.

I would say that the explaining concepts is the easy part. What I spend a lot of time doing is encouraging people to "throw their hat in a ring", making sure the person applies for that job even if they fit all the points on the job spec. Avoiding rejection by not putting yourself forward and self-censoring can cause missed opportunities. I need to take my own advice, This is something I too have been doing, I have never had a blog because I felt I had nothing useful to say, I struggle with spelling and there are so many people better than me writing about stuff online.

I am still committed to codebar, but I am increasing just helping friends in my spare time which doesn't scale well, hopefully, this blog can reach more people.

I am gonna give it a go, not sure 100% what I will talk about, it will most likely be web technologies, and other stuff I find interesting.