How I Ended Up in Front of a Classroom
I didn't plan to become an instructor. I was a working developer who got asked if I'd be interested in teaching at a bootcamp, figured it would be a good way to sharpen my fundamentals, and said yes. Then I did it again at a second program. By the end of it, teaching had changed me in ways I didn't expect — not just as a communicator, but as an engineer.
Here's what I learned.
Imposter Syndrome Is Real — and It Starts on Day One
The students I worked with came from everywhere. Former teachers, restaurant managers, military veterans, recent college grads who majored in something else entirely. Most of them were mid-career changers who had taken a serious financial and personal bet on this pivot. And almost universally, within the first few weeks, the self-doubt hit.
*Everyone else seems to get this faster than I do. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I made a mistake.*
I heard some version of that in almost every cohort. And I always said the same thing: that feeling is not a signal that you don't belong. It's a signal that you're learning something genuinely hard.
But here's the part that I think bootcamps sometimes miss: imposter syndrome doesn't go away by telling students they're doing great. It goes away — or at least becomes manageable — when you give people realistic expectations about what the industry actually looks like.
Senior engineers Google things constantly. Experienced developers get stuck. Nobody memorizes the entire React API. The job isn't to know everything — it's to know how to find answers, how to read documentation, how to reason through a problem you've never seen before. When students understood that *that* was the real skill being developed, the self-comparison to some imagined flawless programmer started to loosen its grip.
Realistic expectations are kinder than false reassurance. That's what I tried to give.
Instructors Have a Responsibility That Not Everyone Takes Seriously
This one I feel strongly about.
Bootcamps operate on a tight timeline. You're covering in weeks what computer science programs spread across years. That pressure can push instructors toward teaching what they know best — even when what they know best is outdated.
I've seen bootcamp curricula still leaning on class-based React patterns long after hooks had become standard. I've seen students taught jQuery as a primary tool in an era where vanilla JavaScript and modern frameworks had made it largely irrelevant. Students graduate, walk into interviews, and get tripped up because the mental model they built doesn't match the environment they're stepping into.
If you're teaching, you have an obligation to stay current. Not just for your own career — for the careers of the people trusting you to prepare them. That means reading the docs when they update. Following the conversations happening in the community. Actually building things outside of class so your instincts stay sharp.
I updated my curriculum constantly. If something I was teaching had a better modern equivalent, I swapped it. If a library had changed its API, I changed the examples. It's more work, but it's the job.
Teaching Across Backgrounds Made Me a Far Better Communicator
This was the unexpected gift.
When your class is twenty-five people with twenty-five completely different mental models — different educational backgrounds, different ages, different prior careers — you cannot rely on one explanation. If you explain closures with a single analogy and half the room doesn't get it, that's on you, not them. You find another angle. Then another. You learn to read when something isn't landing and pivot in real time.
Explaining a REST API to a former nurse is a different conversation than explaining it to someone who studied math in college. Neither is wrong — they just need different entry points. Teaching forced me to build a library of explanations for the same concept, and that library has made me a better collaborator on every team I've worked on since.
The engineers who communicate best aren't always the most technically advanced. They're the ones who can read the room and meet people where they are. Bootcamp teaching is an intensive crash course in exactly that skill.
I'd Recommend It to Every Working Developer
Not just people who want to teach full time. Not just people who feel confident enough to stand in front of a room. I mean everyone — developers at every level who want to pressure-test their own knowledge, build patience, and get better at explaining what they do.
You will discover gaps in your own understanding that years of professional work never surfaced. You will get asked questions you don't know how to answer and have to figure it out in real time. You will watch someone struggle with a concept for three days and finally get it, and there is genuinely nothing like that moment.
The bootcamp students I taught are now working at companies across the country. Some of them have reached out years later to share where they've landed. Every time it happens, I'm reminded why it was worth it.
If you get the chance — take it.
