November 10, 2025 · 1 min read
Why I Teach and Build at the Same Time
The classroom is my research lab, and the terminal is where the findings ship. Notes on living in both worlds.
educationcraftcareer
Most developers guess what users need. I spend every morning with mine.
Teaching and building are usually treated as separate careers. For me they are one loop: the classroom surfaces real problems, the code solves them, and tomorrow’s lesson tests the solution.
The shortest feedback loop in software
When a gradebook feature confuses a colleague, I hear about it at lunch — not in a quarterly survey. When students ignore a tool, I watch it happen in real time. This is user research most product teams would pay dearly for, and I get it for free, daily.
What building taught me about teaching
Good software and good lessons share a skeleton: know your audience, remove friction, sequence complexity, and never confuse covering material with communicating it.
What teaching taught me about building
Patience, mostly. And that the person struggling with your interface is never the problem — the interface is.
If you can, find a way to live close to your users. Everything else in the craft gets easier.