From the classroom to the codebase: how teaching made me a better engineer

Before I built platforms, I stood in front of classrooms. In 2021 I worked as a teaching assistant at Kirindine Secondary School, and in 2023 I taught Mathematics and Physics at Thaicu Secondary School. Both placements were in Meru County, and both shaped how I work today.

Explaining things simply

A teacher cannot hide behind jargon. If a student does not understand, the explanation failed, not the student. I carry that into software. When I write documentation, design a form or explain an architecture to a client, I ask the same question: would this make sense to someone seeing it for the first time?

Planning before performing

Drafting lesson plans taught me to start with the outcome and work backwards. Every sprint, every feature and every client project I run now begins the same way: what should be true at the end, and what are the steps to get there?

Patience with mistakes

Students learn by getting things wrong, and so do developers. Debugging is just teaching yourself, one failed assumption at a time.

Leadership through mentoring

Mentoring students gave me my first experience of leading people. It is the reason mentorship sits at the heart of IsoMount Tech Collective. I left the classroom, but I never stopped teaching.