Will teach HTML for food

Two years ago, right after my last CSS Day, the FDND posse handed me a thank you gift, wrapped in brown paper, with a postcard attached to it. It showed the well-known “Will code HTML for food” meme, but they changed it with a little Post-it note, overwriting the word “code” with “teach”. I think about this a lot lately.

Apart from the usual shelf-stacking supermarket job as a kid, I've always been self-employed, freelancing and hopping from project to project, collecting longer running clients throughout the years (vendor lock-inning them with my SaaS CMS). I don't know any better. My mom—being self-employed for as long as I can remember as well—taught me to stand on my own feet, nearly always. Not always nearby, my dad taught me to keep things simple. And not get too attached to lifely matters.

My experience with my own school-going reflects this, sort of. When I was young, we moved house quite a lot. I've seen 4 different primary schools from the inside, in both The Netherlands and Belgium. While cycling through secondary school, we moved a few more times. Four years in, in 2000, we ended up 21.7 kilometers away from my school, in a different city. Or 23.8 kilometers, depending on which bridge you'd take to get there. I decided to cycle there and back every single day, choosing which bridge each morning, depending on the wind direction. And since I was the only teenager going this route, I was doing this alone 100% of the time.

After secondary school I wanted to stay closer to home and spend less hours a day in solitary cycling mode. I picked a new university close by, which had a focus on building a bridge between nerds and businessy people, to put it bluntly. Part computery stuff, part communicationy stuff, part businessy stuff. Seemed like an obvious choice, and I like the bridge metaphor in retrospect.

Three years in, I decided to burn my bridges and quit school. I sucked at presenting my work, which made the grading people think I didn't do enough work. I'm a drop-out. My drop-in replacement was self-education, getting hooked on reading web development blogs, and—like I did anyway—just build a lot of stuff. Both software and, accidentally, communities, eventually.

In 2015 I was approached by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences to help out with a frontend course for second year students. Later, in 2016, 2017 and 2018 I helped out with the Minor Web Design & Development for third year students. I was involved with a course on Browser Technologies, with topics like new browser APIs, accessibility, progressive enhancement and feature detection. I mostly didn't have to deal with grading students, only with the contents itself, which was great! Especially because I didn't understand why anyone would want to be graded by me. Or how that didn't collide too much with my own ideas about someone else telling them what's Right or Wrong.

So I blended teaching, developing and conference organising those years, and was able to share a lot of that mix with students, like in 2017.

During that period, Michelle and I had twins, our first kids. I decided to work less, and focus more on my family. On creating a robust foundation, like one does when writing HTML. Maybe I'm so focused on solid ground due to my own turbulent past, I don't know. But I didn't have the time (nor the energy) to help students anymore, and said no to the 2019 minor. A few months later, on April 4, my dad passed away. 404 Not Found had a different ring to it from that day on.

And then the Corona pandemic happened. We weren't allowed to hold any conferences for two years. Two lovely stress-free years; not worrying over selling tickets, or being inclusive enough, or looking for new talent to freshen up our line-up another time, or about still being relevant, or keeping my business partner in check. And with two young kids, my own clients and projects, a recently inherited little cottage off the grid, and years of just-in-case savings, I had plenty of stuff to do. My badminton club asked me if I could come up with something to make playing inside badminton during Corona safe, with government guidelines and safety instructions in constant flux. I built a flexible web app and I think we were amongst the first clubs in The Netherlands to play again that way.

Another little thing I prototyped and tested during that period—being somewhat bored—was my score board app, which I happily raved about on LinkedIn. In March 2022 I was invited by a former student—who was now teaching at uni himself—to do a short presentation about how I built that web app. I said yes for shits and giggles, shat bricks for a while, and gave it my best shot. I had sort of forgotten how fun it was to share knowledge and enthusiasm about the Web, but afterwards, I felt like doing this more often, and told some people.

Meanwhile, FDND, a new two-year Associate Degree frontend program—designed and developed by the same people behind the minor—was running its first year. I joined them as a freelance co-teacher in 2022. As a sort of “experienced person from the field”, without any responsibilities. Since I don't have any proper education, and was very reluctant to present professionally before a group of people, teaching class was quite stressful. Luckily colleagues—a word I didn't really use or feel until that point—provided me with a lot of feedback and feedforward, and I learned a lot. There's now less stress, and a tiny bit more confidence.

A year later I became responsible for my own group of students, which I had to guide through their first two semesters. I've been doing that for three years now, meddling with our curriculum, workshops and grading method along the way. Because I had so much fun, I even signed the first proper salaried employment contract in my life for a year. There was a lot of FUD from the Dutch tax authorities involved, but here we are. In about two months that contract will expire, and with the current new registrations for September, it looks like I'm no longer needed, and I'll go my own route again. Don't get too attached to lifely matters.

As part of my contract, I had to follow the course “Basic Qualification in Teaching Competence” for half a year. During this course, I learned a lot of theory which I hadn't applied so far, or at most unknowingly. I heard stuff about self-determination theory, didactic coaching, constructive alignment, blended learning and group dynamics, and I had to try some of these new things out in my workshops and coaching.

At home, we talk a lot about what we learn and do during the days. My kids are eight years old now, devour books in an enviable way, and were very interested in learning about what I was learning at school—less so in what I was teaching students. Of course I had already tried to spoon-feed them bits of HTML when they were younger, but it missed some basic ingredients I didn't know about back then. Two months ago I tried out something new I picked up about the self-determination theory, which is mostly about human motivation. Basically, the theory says you need autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Together we designed a coding workshop for their classmates, and a few days later we had a lot of fun teaching (and learning) HTML together.

And since my kids are in separate classes, I got to do it again, with a slightly improved version and some bugfixes, two days later.

As a thank you, I received some chocolate from their teachers. So, in a way, I'm finally teaching HTML for food. There might not be a market for this, but since we've paid off our mortgage this month anyway, perhaps teaching HTML for food isn't that bad of a new hobby going forward.

And maybe something fundamental like HTML should just be part of each primary school's curriculum.