I have started teaching, evenings and weekends, and it is doing something to my craft that I did not expect.
I am at NAIT now, on the continuing education side, in the computer training area. Basic design. Basic HTML. Basic photography. Rooms full of people who have jobs and families and have chosen to spend a Tuesday night learning what I know.
You do not truly understand a thing until you have to teach it to a tired person at seven in the evening. Every shortcut I have taken for years gets exposed the moment somebody asks why. I have found holes in my own understanding that I had been quietly walking around for a decade.
It started with WordPress, because I love it, and it has grown into something larger. We are building a proper curriculum, a certificate, and it has already expanded past WordPress into content management more broadly. How to theme it. How to structure it. How to keep it secure, which is a serious subject and one that is easy to keep putting off.
What I want a student to leave with is not software, because software will change. I want them to leave able to ask what a thing is for, and unafraid of the parts that look like engineering.
I did not expect to love this, and I do. There is something about handing over what took years to learn, freely, to a person who will actually use it. It is a quiet way to let the work outlive me.