[I'm a part of my church's programming team. We are a team of
volunteers. I've had some thing happen to me a few times, and so
I'm writing it in a blog post to try to get my own handle of how I feel
about it... you may have been here, too].
I was aproached by a leader in the church (who I have total respect
for) with a guy who could be a possible resource. I'm
thrilled. More workers means less of my free time programming and
more of it is involved with managing the project as well as there is
now less work for me because there are a couple more hands.
Here's the problem: the individual is a systems support guy who is
learning HTML. (I could go off on why do people think that HTML
is programming... I guess it can be complicated enough, but it's not
programming).
I have taught people to program, but it usually started with me handing
them a VB book or some VB tutorial and sending them away... if they had
read the book within the month and/or were still interested a month
later, I would begin to mentor them. My mentoring time is pretty
taxed right now, so my initial reaction is I have no time to teach
someone while doing this project (I already have 2 tasks that are
eating into my time -- or will); teaching takes longer than actually
doing it.... Part of me says it's not the right reaction... in a
volunteer world you need every hand you can get... My initial reaction
is certainly not the "Christian" thing to do (something I'm really
critical of others for). So what's a guy to do...
Oh yeah, and the project is in C# not VB, so my experience teaching C#
is never... I'm not even sure how this is going to work out as VB is a
lot easier to learn (in my opinion). I guess my first move will
be to find a tutorial on C# that seems basic enough for him, and send
him away until he has enough knowledge that I can give him a CodeSmith
template, and turn him loose and see what he does...
[I really need to produce some CodeSmith or MyGeneration templates that
generate a complete set of screens (entry/edit/delete/report)]