Meetings, most of them without bullet points or a specific topic.
I'm coordinating another devs too and that costs less time then meetings to projects. We don't have the best product owner culture, so I need to fill that role too. But we are working on that topic atm and we are reaching the first goals.
It's funny and I like it, but sometimes I just block time in my calendar to do tasks two weeks ahead. So nobody is able to schedule me on a meeting without asking before.
That makes most people think about if I'm really necessary.
I am self-tought and i made the experience that being wrong helped me to evolve. I guess i grinded the gears of many people in bulletin boards or irc channels in the moment i came by with my naive solutions.
But getting corrections and new insights helped me to grow. This is something i want to transfer to my trainee aswell.
I would also add that it's important to learn that what you are teaching now may be considered an anti-pattern down the road. Or that the framework de jour is going to become tech debt in 5 years.
So it's really important to distinguish between long term viable fundamental skills/techniques from current best practices.
A specific example of this is I started using javascript a lot, then Prototype.js then jQuery came out (which did not litter the core objects with protoype inheritances, which is better...) and now back to vanilla js now that the browser incompatibilities are minimal. The only long term viable skill here is coding in general, and vanilla js, everything else was a fad of sorts.
Have fun teaching, I really enjoy this part of my work.
Well, he has the basics like data control structures, database usage, a little bit OOP. I think the missing link is how to build real world processes with it.
I'm sure we will find basics that are missing and will have to fill that with knowledge, but we have a good starting point.
By what you said above, don't underestimate yourself there. Building scripts that touch real things to make it better working for you (and others) is a great step on the journey to write good code! Thanks for your feedback :)
It's not a book, but I loved it and it is really helpful.