A teacher from high school.

I finish the assignment early, shit on everyone’s head in terms of speed and performances and this guy first praises me, then slams the keyboard with random chars, letters and weird shit in an application which was supposed to only accept numbers.

“But… the requirements said…”
“I’m your manager and I am dumb af. Trust me, this will happen a lot irl.”

You remember that turtle game where you draw stuff? And lemmings. My dad got me playing with those at a young age. And one time I was ill as a kid, he took me into work with a briefcase full of lego, he woked away quietly while the rest of the office set doom up for me. Pretty awesome.

YOU ARE YOUR OWN TEACHER. The failures I got in the past , failed to build a simple app , I get to where I am today because I failed many times.

My best teacher for this will always be my mistakes , my mistakes are the greatest teacher

My dad actually. He's been in the industry for 40+ years. (Mostly answers my questions with a question and we end up talking about a whole different concept but in the end he's an amazing teacher.)

My middle school teacher showed me Scratch, I really loved it, then I jumped on AppInventor and SmallBasic.

I'm really glad I attended his courses.
Now I'm in college babyyyy

A relative told me that if I were actually smart I would be getting other people do development work for me.

He is also very wealthy. Clearly wealthy off the backs of dumb people.

None, actually.

Tho I should thank Mr. S, calculus teacher in my last year of highschool, and most of my physics teachers, and that one lady in first year of highschool teaching maths. I think those were way more important in teaching me logic than the folks who pretended to teach me stuff later in uni.

Oh, and that dude, Sir O.D., who was my professor of embedded microcontrollers in uni. Didn't teach me much programming, rather taught a memorable lesson on VHDL and how hardware really works.

Personally, I prefer learning from examples, trial-and-error and official user manuals over teachers or online courses.

The football stadium game from the 1995 "Thinkin Things Collection 3" where you choreograph players and marching bands to paint the ground.

My game design & dev teacher. He was a level designer for an old german game company so he wasn't actually a proper programmer.
What made him a good teacher was he knew what he could teach and what was beyond his skills, and encouraged self study in those areas.
Not that many did, but those who did are all decent devs now.

fireship channel on youtube is one of my favorites

My Mentor during the 1st year of my College

Set High Expectations and very frequently used to throw insults and shame me as if I knew nothing. And he was not wrong. I sucked so bad. Did learn some basics and promoted me one level from the "total newbie" state

But my best Mentor would have to be my PCs, Compilers, Debuggers. Couldn't find a better one

My AP Computer Science teacher changed my life in 2001. Until then, I wasn’t considering a career in development. He challenged me to write a back propagating multi layer perceptron neural network, and an RPN calculator. Every day made me think about how to solve problems at an algorithmic level. He was brutally honest, and one of the reasons why I’m an team manager now. RIP, your legacy won’t be forgotten.

Hardware

Let's see.

1. Scott Meyers.
He has a gift at teaching. Easily simplifies and structures complex concepts into memorable bits. And he has that charisma/strategy that you could watch/read any of his presentation/tutorial without prior context and it would still be interesting and fun (and of course improves your understanding on that topic).

2. My trainer at the first company I worked at. Fantastic guy. He would never answer a question right away. He would take a minute, go on to explain an abstract concept and then sort of derive the answer to the original question. Always, towards the end, we would be beaming at each other. I, because the answer would 'click' just before his reveal and him, because of the joy that his explanation worked.
He also emphasized working with the absolute minimal examples just like Meyers.

I think actually this question is asking the wrong crowd...

I think we're more often ranting about it experiences with incompetent ones?

Myself/the Internet/Baeldung (at least lately because mostly Java dev now)

Never had one of those but the teacher that was in charge of the Databases 101 course at my college was very memorable and supportive.

Got me through my graduate thesis and into a few gigs that gave me precious experience and confidence.

No CS teacher in my federal state since the teaching plan absolutely sucks ass.
Basically it attempts to teach you java without actually explaining it.
So people now know how algorithm XY works and looks in java, but are unable to differentiate between a float and an int.

My CS teacher is awesome tho in the regard that he single-handedly advanced our school digitally by about 15 years.
We now have tablet classes, 3D printers, more CS courses for lower grades etc. etc.
You get the picture.