Learning Via Teaching

I went to my second NSCoder Night Boston and was reminded how useful it is teach someone else a task that you know well, because it makes you think through all of the details.

The loose "bring your projects to work with others" nature of the meet up vaguely works against me, because my personal computer is not optimized for portability. Moving a previous generation Mac Pro across the house is work; hauling it on public transit would be pure folly. This means I need to either help other people with their projects, sit back and watch, or just be social rather than do the tech thing.

This time around, there was a new member who's just getting into iOS development. I helped him convert an example project he'd done from a table view to a collection view, converted the project from a pure code project to modern storyboards, auto layout, and attempted to explain the how and why of dequeueing instead of just creating new cells every time.

It was all novice level training, but I saved someone time and pointed them in the right direction. It also reminded me of all sorts of little implementation details that I just take for granted, and I do find that there's nothing quite like having to figure out how to explain a concept in plain English to cement your understanding of it.