Every career I've had, I've ended up teaching. As a jet engine mechanic, I trained new mechanics on the floor. As a military flight engineer, I went through instructor school and got certified to teach. As a firefighter, I became the old head who showed the younger guys the ropes — and along the way I earned an Associate's degree in Vocational Education and a Distance Learning and Design certificate from the University of Washington, because I wanted to understand not just how to do the work, but how to teach it well. Later, as a Systems Administrator for the Air Force and then a project manager, that same instinct kept showing up. Stephen Covey put it simply: you learn by teaching. That's been true in every field I've worked in, and it's true here.

When I started using ChatGPT, then Gemini, then Claude, I got hooked — not just on the tools, but on what they could do once you knew how to talk to them. I went looking for somewhere to learn prompt engineering properly and mostly found scattered tips from pundits: useful in the moment, but with no path, no structure, nothing that built on itself. That's the gap I know how to fill. Learning Prompt Engineering is my attempt to teach this the way I was trained to teach anything — with a real curriculum, not off-hand advice.