Teaching programming

A few days ago, once my business plan was completed, I have met a friend of mine, who was StarCrafter in my clan for about 4 years, and is eager to become a programmer. He's still a student actually, though they don't get much of an education here anyway. That was the prime reason I have left the university myself - it's been a waste of time for most part.

Anyway, we had a meeting, and came to an agreement concerning his participation in our project. I'm going to teach him the things I know myself about being a programmer, and in about 2 or 3 months he will start his actual work on the project, with myself giving him a close look and support. I won't be able to leave my current job any sooner, so the project won't start until that time anyway.

Yesterday we had a 2-hours teaching session, where I have introduced C# .NET to him. He did learn some Basic, C, Fortran, and SQL in the university, though he had never took part in any serious project yet. As I already said, they don't receive much knowledge there, so I'll have to teach him almost from the start, including some stuff like coding conventions, clear code rules, refactoring etc. I wish someone would teach me that at the time I have started my programming career.. :)

Well, what can I say after the session we had.. guy does have a head, though he'll need a lot of practice to become of any use to us. However, I am pretty optimistic about him, because:

- He does want to learn, and this is the major thing;
- I do have some teaching skills, being a programming teacher for some schoolboys during my summer holidays at 2nd grade; later I've been a StarCraft teacher for many young fellas down here, adopting new strategies and teaching them how to use them properly;
- He respects me a lot for myself being both a programmer and a progamer, and he's always open to my ideas; actually during these years I had a few guys I had to teach who didn't respect me enough to listen carefully. I either earned their respect in some way, or dropped the teaching, because it won't be very useful in such a situation.
- I trust him a lot, because I know him for several years now, and because.. because I know him for several years know. I mean, he's a rare kind of a person, a person who can be trusted. That said, I'm willing to make business with him. The main thing I have understood about the business is that you don't have to start anything with someone you don't like or you don't trust. Even more, starting anything with such a person would be a disaster. Someday somehow it will pose great problems. And you can't be sure you will be able to recover after such kind of a problem, a problem coming from inside of your installation.

So, I'm glad the boy's with us, basically there have left only two more people to settle down things with: our graphics designer, and our investor. Both are my long-known friends, so I think we'll come to an agreement one way or another, without much arguments and give-me-more-or-I-won't-participate kind of stuff.