I publicised the fact that I'm giving Private Lessons on my home site. I've been contacted several times from potential pupils, but nothing materialised. Until this week, when someone contacted me about me giving him private lessons in Perl.
He is a soon-to-be Interdisciplinary Center graduate, who got a job doing QA in Perl, so he wanted to learn it for his job. I gave him an hour lesson on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a three hour lesson on Thursday. I think it went pretty well, and I was able to convey a lot of the important material. He is an intelligent guy, but still a bit clueless in stuff that I've taken for granted for a long time.
For his work he needs to learn parsing and writing to excel files, extracting data out of XML files, and interacting with the web. So I taught him XML::LibXML, LWP and other stuff. The lesson on Thursday dealt with XML and it took a long time due to the fact that he didn't know too much about XML and I needed to explain a lot of stuff.
To sum up, for me it was a fun and mentally rewarding experience and I also got some money in return. I hope there will be more opportunities like that.
