When I was at the university I was enraged by the grades the other students were getting: it was not because it was complicated, it was because the topic was poorly explained.

So I asked the uni to borrow a classroom and hold my own courses, a summary once before every exam. The grades went up and I felt useful for the first time in my life.

I kept explaining things to friends and colleagues after that, while being a full time dev. That's the only thing I was consistently better at than most people. There were better devs, but I could explain python decorators to a junior like if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I felt proud of it.

I also still was regularly irritated by the terrible state of teaching. Why do people explain react by first installing webpack + babel while you can just drop a script tag and start playing? Why do nobody tells you what a bloody env var is, like you are supposed to be born knowing that? Why no beginner course ever include an intro to a debugger, do you enjoy having your students suffer? Why do they keep using the confusing reverse arrow in git history schemas, as if technically correct where the best kind of correct?

One day, I decided to do charity work in West Africa. I ended up stayed there for 2 years, eventually created my own company. Things where good.

Then the war started. My company went down, my bank account was frozen and I was forced back home, in debt. Fun times.

I looked for missions to quickly make cash, but in France dev doesn't pay that much. So I dug, and noticed that training professionals was incredibly well paid, thousands of dollars for a few days of work, which for the country is insane. It felt like stealing. It still does sometimes.

But I needed the money, and I though I was good at it, so I spammed dozens of entities. After a few courses, in which everybody was surprised there were no slide and the program kept changing, the phone started ringing.

Apparently most professional trainers suck too, and companies were astonished that not only the trainees could enjoy the session, but that they gained productivity afterward. Why did they paid so much money before, then? It's a mystery to me.

But I kept at it every since.

I usually do training once a month: JS, Python, Git, lot of web, a little bit of data analysis, best practice or design patterns.

But I still dev the rest of the time, otherwise I would always go from planes to hotels and that's no life. Besides, a trainer who doesn't code becomes obsolete very quickly.

Yet I try to get remote gigs for American clients: french customers never pay as much and they are very risk adverse so the projects are less interesting. I do have a few, because we know each others very well and working together is a blast: we can have drinks, say offensive jokes and still get the stuff done. Money is not everything.

All in all, I like training people. It's frustrating, infuriating even sometimes. And exhausting. But when I'm fed up with computers, I get to see people. And when I'm fed up with people, I go back to my computer.