CHUCK LAUER VOSE: So, I want to welcome you to,
to my talk. It's, yes, you can,
you can raise your hand now.
I gave him the job of raising his hand
any time I say so or um at the beginning of the sentence. So.
We're gonna talk about building kick-ass internal education programs.
Sometimes when you don't necessarily have a mandate from
your boss or from the organization. But it's important,
right. We need to be able to build these
programs and we need to be able to educate
ourselves, and so we sometimes have to just do
it.
I have one thing, though, before we start. I
want you to know that if I raise my
hand, like this, or if this fellow down here
raises his hand, that's, I want you to raise
your hand as well. So let's practice this really
quick. Yes. Very good. OK. Good. This is how
I'm gonna get your attention. Usually it means it's
time to shut up. But not always. But we're
gonna do some activities, and I have to get
your attention somehow, so, that's effective.
For now, I would like you to. We've been
sitting all day, right? And how can you keep
your brain going if you're sitting? So I want
you to, to stand up and take a three
minute stretch break, if you're able to stand. And
introduce yourself to your neighbors. So you have three
minutes.
Wow. You guys are so good at that. This
is really great. One of my favorite things about
that activity is that everyone, every time I do
something like that, people tell me, nerds won't do
activities. They won't stand up. They won't talk to
each other. That's crazy. And every time it goes
over gang busters. In fact, I think we gained
fifty people just cause we were making tons of
noise. That's good.
We're gonna talk about inspiration, partly. Every, every RailsConf,
I go for the inspiration track. They don't actually
have that listed. But there's always clearly those talks.
I'm going to try and inspire you to take
action on education at home.
I have a one point takeaway, because you've been,
like, how much, how much knowledge can you really
retain in a day of conferencing? So, I want
you to remember one thing, and, and that's that
internal education is easy. I'm gonna start around Monday.
Hopefully you'll be able to say that by the
end of the talk.
But, two point takeaway, cause there's slightly more content,
is that you don't need to know everything to
teach. And also that education isn't particularly expensive or
hard to do. I make it look difficult because
that's how I get paid. But you don't have
to do it that way.
So, I had a number of. I had a
number of titles that my wife vetoed. One of
them is Covert Education: Sneaking in Education Without Them
Knowing. I also had, How to Education When You
Don't Know What the Hell You're Doing, which is
very true.
But, like I said, they got vetoed. So, like,
like I said, my name is Chuck Lauer Vose.
I have bright hair. You can find me around
the conference if you have questions about education. I
like ferrets, food, photography. I wish photography had an
f cause I'm kind of like that. I was
a founder of the Portland Code School and I
am an education engineer at New Relic.
Also I like magnets and ponies and pets wearing
clothes. And my coworkers are jerks.
But I love them.
So, first I want to start and talk about
some inspiration from myself. Akira Matsuda, who, I don't
know if he's in the, in the room at
the moment, but was just doing a talk over
there. Two years ago I saw him at Ruby
on Ales. And the thing that was so cool
was that at the time, this was, I guess
this was 2012, he, he didn't speak a lot
of English. And he decided he wanted to talk
through code, cause we all, it was our common
language, right. And he was very nervous. He was
incredibly nervous. But the thing he did, by accident,
was by, he very clearly demonstrated what he expected
of the audience. What he said at the beginning
was, at the beginning of his talk was, he
said, every time I pause, I want you to
reassure me by clapping.
And so I want to ask you to do
the same thing. This is my first talk and
I'm, I'm a little nervous. I'll be honest. So
every time I have like a, a, you see,
like a big title slide or something, or every
time I, I pause and, and look nervous, I
want you to just, like, applause the shit out
of me. That would be really helpful for me.
Thank you so much. That was so much better
than I had planned.
OK. So, I want to talk about how I
got started in education. And unfortunately, it's an incredibly
embarrassing story for me. How many of you know
Eve online? All right. So, you all know that
this is the, like, the nerdiest, nerdiest MMO game,
commonly referred to as spreadsheets in space. So, that's
how I got started teaching.
And the reason is that, you know, this is
the, sort of, common learning curve thing. Eve is,
Eve is the black line with the dead bodies
everywhere, and it's so true. In fact, it's so
difficult to learn, there's an entire alliance of, I
think, last count, 2,000 people all educating each other,
because it's just that damn hard.
Well, not satisfied to, to just join Eve, or
the Eve University, I wanted to do my own
thing. They were doing, they weren't doing what I
wanted to do at the time. So I started
my own guild and we got eighty people, which
I think was a huge success. We had weekly
speaking events by prominent PVP players. But it was
the first time I'd done public speaking, ever, and
I have to say that, that was way more
intense and way more indicting than space piracy or
PVP. Just so, so scary.
After that, I, apparently added in a lot of
animation slides. Burnside Digital was a forty person company.
This was actually at work, now. But, education was
not a thing. It was something that I had
to sort of hack in around the edges. I
still, at this point, didn't realize I was educating,
but I was doing things like lightning talks and
little jazzy rolls.
So I started small and I, I tried to
share success with other people, and it, it actually
went really well. By the end we had lightning
talks that the entire company came to and were
wildly heralded, and we started seeing other things popping
up, like pair programming workshops and other cool things.
So, it was really neat to, to not have
any mandate to do this and still find ways
to, to take a little bit of time each
week, and as it was successful, it grew and
grew and we got more financing and, and we
were able to buy lunch for everyone. It was
just cool to demonstrate that success.
Sort of still at that, that school, or at
that company, Burnside Digital, I started an intern program
gone terribly wrong. And I say it went terribly
wrong because it was supposed to be three people
every three months and ended up being seventeen people
shortly afterwards.
But I still didn't know how to teach. I
still had no idea. In fact I, I think
I'd only barely accepted the fact that I might
educating at that point. But I had a really
smart guy talk to me in the beginning, and
he said that an educator, at least in the
maths and technologies, is not someone who knows everything.
It's someone who creates a space where people can
learn. I think that's such a crazy difference of
thought to say, to realize that they weren't expecting
me to know all the things. Just to set
up a place where people could go and read
their book and, and get it done right.
And I can definitely say that PCS was the
most inspiring experience of my life. Definitely the most
proud. I am still connected to all the students.
And it still kind of, I don't know if
it's the highlight of my life. It kind of
makes me sad to think that that might be
in the past. But I wonder what I go
towards next.
Now, now is different, though. I work for New
Relic, and New Relic really cares about education. And
I didn't, I didn't quite know how much they
cared about it until month six. But, and so
I, I work on building internal education for engineers.
They're way smarter than me. Like, terrifyingly, frighteningly smarter
than me, and I, I can't teach them anything.
I literally don't know anything more than them.
But I can create a space for learning. And
I, I can, I can help do some things
that allow engineers the, the extra time to get
back to their day life. Like, they can communicate
to me and then I can build curriculum for
them. So, like, I can do things there. And
I can help organize events, too, which is a
huge time sink for most engineers. Believe it or
not, engineers are not good at organizing events for
the most part.
So that's something I can do. So this was,
this was our mandate when I first talked to
them at New Relic. Make the already awesome engineers
at New Relic awesomer. It's like, ah, that's cool.
Holy shit.
I don't know how to do that. Like, I've
been trying, I've been applying here for ten years.
I, I can't, like, I want to come here
so I can level up. Wow. That's super intense.
I totally have to recommend that. It's like the
best tactic ever.
OK. So, you don't need to know everything. That's
the one thing I want you to take away
from this. Well, OK. That's one of the three.
I kind of lied. You don't have to know
everything. You need to be passionate and inspiring and
you need to give of yourself in this activity.
I still have no idea what I am doing.
I'm learning it, too. And you can do it.
OK. Activities. So, I want you to spend thirty
seconds thinking about an effective educative experience from your
past. I want you to share this with your
neighbor. Two minutes. I'll raise my hand.
Wow. That is like half the time. You are
continually impressive to me.
So. OK. So, a good educator pushes people out
of their comfort zone. I know that most everyone
else. I haven't seen another presentation where people have
forced you to talk to people. And I think
it's important. So, I really like, I really like
that quote. And I like this image in general.
If we're growing, we're always going to be out
of our comfort zone. So, in some ways, you
know, we, we talked about, an educator is just
someone who creates an effective space for learning. And
part of that is pushing people. You saw me
walking around, and if anyone wasn't talking, I'd force
them to talk to me. Which is way scarier.
So I think that's a, that's a huge part.
Who knows these guys?
Yeah. Everyone. This is Bill Nye and Neal Degrasse
Tyson. I didn't know Neal Degrasse Tyson when I
was a kid, but Bill Nye I sure as
hell knew. And I really love how much they,
they inspire people. That seems to be their, their
main thing, now, right? I know that, I know
Neal Degrasse Tyson, at least, still has a class
room somewhere. But I don't know where it is.
His, his primary thing for me is just the
inspiration to continue, to continue learning. He keeps exposing
me to new, to new things about space that
I never thought about before. And for me, when
I educate you, I'm exp- I'm gonna expose you
to the idea that you could, in fact, do
these things. You could be the teacher.
And I hope that when you go home and
talk to people, you'll inspire them to learn the
code that you're thinking about.
The last thing I think a good educator does
is, gives of themselves out of love. And I
think this really applies to the open source community
as well and the open source ethic. And, I,
this is, this is partly a preparation for you,
that education may take some time outside of work.
Sometimes. But so does open source. And I can
tell you that it's worth it.
So turn to your neighbor and give them a
high five.
I don't, I don't think this would work in
many other communities than the Ruby community. So, I,
I actually thought about making that activity, applaud for
the next thing only by using your neighbor's hand.
But I think that'd be very difficult.
How many of you have seen this XKCD strip
about nerd sniping? If you haven't. So, I taught
my wife this a little while ago, that one
of the. So nerd sniping is where you just
sort of, you say one little thing that forces
someone to just spawn off, like, a number of
different thought processes. It's basically a mental fork bomb,
if you know that term.
And, one of the best ways, and this is
a very dangerous tool. I'm giving you very powerful
tools here. One of the best ways to do
this is to say, hey Joe, what's the most
efficient way to do whatever? Doesn't even matter. What's
the most efficient way to sweep the floor? They're
done.
So, efficient is this funny word. I'm talking about
being an efficient educator, and so I apologize in
advance, cause I, I hope this destroys you. Mostly
I'm gonna talk about some, one of the things
you mentioned was, how do you create a space
conducive to learning? Is it a physical space? Is
it an actual thing? Like, do you have to
have a classroom? And the answer is, no, it
is not generally a physical space. However, it does
tend to involve some real estate somewhere. But it
could be a mixed use space. It could be
the couches. Whatever.
So, the first one. My most favorite. The place
I started was lightning talks. And the thing I've
seen work the most was thirty to sixty minutes
before lunch on Friday. And the reason I think
that works is that, as you, as you finish
the talks, people can continue their discussion through lunch.
Very effective.
The other thing is that if it goes well,
you can move it back by thirty minutes and
get your company to buy lunch, thus increasing your
happiness and your number of people coming. Which is
great.
Lightning talks are super easy to do. You just
need to find a couple people who can do
five to ten minute talks on whatever. I've seen
effective lightning talks done with no technical content. I
would recommend some technical content. Just, you know, for
reasons.
But I've seen, I've seen lightning talks that were
very well-received on homebrewing. In fact, I've seen entire
presentations on homebrewing. I've also seen really effective ones
where you demo a product. Especially if you have
a big thing, like New Relic. It would be
really useful to me if I could just see
one person's take on one feature every week. I
might actually make it through my product by the
end of three years. It's so big.
But also showing off a new gem or just
generally inspiring the people around you. This, education is
so much about inspiring people. You can't force people
to learn, right. You can't, well, you can sit
them down if you have the mandate, but they
don't have to learn unless they really want to.
So, it's all about inspiration.
And the last pro tip I have for you
about lightning talks is that, if you bring food,
they will come. That's great. So that's how we
ended up with a whole company basically showing up
every single Friday to an event that involved sitting
on the couches. Which I realize is probably not
that hard of a proposition, but.
So the other, the other one, some of my
coworkers have been working on this recently. Mob refactors.
In fact, Kayla?? (00:18:53) was the person who introduced
me to this idea that you get everyone in
a room, pick some bit of code you really
want to hack on, and everyone hacks on it
together.
It's important to review the code, not the author.
Because that can be really offensive to the author.
Especially if they're in the room. And if they're
not in the room, that could just be bad
in general. But you rewrite the code together, and
then, and this is the part that kind of
blows my mind, you throw it out afterwards.
It's like mind maps. They're not really that helpful
after the fact. And the code you write during
the mob refactor is probably bad. But the conversation
you have during a mob refactor is very good.
So, this has been working really well for us,
and, in fact, looking back on it, I saw
groups doing it. But it wasn't called mob refactoring.
I didn't know what it was called then. I
just saw them doing it, and it being really
effective.
Pair programming is something that everyone knows they're supposed
to be doing, right. But no, none of us
do. Because it's hard. And, and the thing people
don't talk about is that, pair programming, to me,
is a trade off of speed for quality. And,
and I think that's really important. So if you
find yourself, or your product in a place where
things are not going as smoothly as you would
like. I don't know if anyone's had that problem.
Pairing may very well be one of the, the
big power tools to look at.
So I have two, two sneaky little methods to
get pairing happening, because I know a lot of
you have tried getting your company to pair. You've
tried, like, getting a manager mandate and, and they
can't make it happen. There's two methods that have
worked well at New Relic.
So, the first one, is my method, is called
the sneaky monitor. And, what you do here, is
you set aside from time, like you make an
appointment with your, your team mate, and you literally
bring your monitor to their desk. And it's annoying.
Because then you're gonna sweep like half of their
shit off their desk. And then at the end,
you try to be a nice citizen. You help
them, like, put all the things back in order,
and you know, maybe it's the first time their
desk has ever been dusted. But that's cool. It's
nice.
And then the next week you come back again
and you sweep all the shit off their desk
and put your monitor there. And by the third
week, you know, maybe they just haven't put their
desk back into shape, and you just plop your
monitor down and, and by the fourth week, you
find a, a little monitor there. You're like, aw,
that's nice. Thank you. And then by the fifth
week, you've got actual monitor there, and you thank
the IT people and, and then you go find
someone else and start it again.
And I've, I've, it sounds silly, right. You can
only touch one person at a time. But then,
then they start taking their monitor somewhere, after they've
seen the fun of it. And then you've got
two. Two people doing it. And I've seen this
happening at New Relic to, to both great affect
and great detriment. Because we're totally out of space.
And now I see these monitor, like, pairing stations
popping up everywhere, and the management is pissed at
me cause I've taught them pairing. And so.
There was another cool method that came up recently
that I really like. This is Emily's method. Emily
Heinleind in the Insights team, and what she recommended
was sending out an open invite to anyone who
wants to try pairing, to bring their monitor to
the lunch room, and I'll, I'll find you a
buddy to work on for that one hour, or
whatever. We'll talk about some style. Some thing you
can practice. And then go to town. That's it.
It's a great way to get those who are
already interested in it going, because they don't have
friends who they can do it with on their
team, maybe. So they can't practice, and there, therefore
they can't well know well enough how to convert
their team mate. They just don't know enough yet.
It's a great idea.
There's only a couple more. So workshops. I mentioned
these. Basically, you pick a theme. We did this
maybe a week ago on refactoring, and it was
so cool. So we, Katie Miller picked a, a
topic. Some Rails Cast on the service object pattern.
So we watched, we all watched the Rails Cast.
She showed us, like, ten minutes of her code
where she tried to apply that and we talked
about it a little bit. And then for forty
minutes we paired on trying to do that on
a random snippet of code, to various effect. You
know, sometimes it didn't work. Sometimes it did.
But it was really cool. And then for the
last twenty minutes we, we came back together and
we all demoed. And it was so, like, I
feel like I got two days of education out
of that hour and a half. And it was
shocking to me. I mean, not only was I
exhausted afterwards, which, maybe not super great, but I
really felt like I learned a lot. And it's,
it's an education experience I had never had before.
I'd never tried this. So it was really cool.
Thank you. I. I have to tell you, like,
I've been rushing a little bit, because I was
worried if I paused long enough that you, that
you were gonna clap at me again. I feel
like, this is, this is actually ideal though. Like,
I would rather feel embarrassed by how often someone
is clapping than the opposite. So this is good.
So, this one, this one I've only seen a
couple times at New Relic, but it was amazing.
This was literally one of the most amazing things
I have ever seen or experienced. And it was
a total accident. They had no idea they were
doing it. I only later found out it has
a name, later.
Basically, all of our smartest engineers got around the
table, like they usually do. But this time, there
were too many of them to have the discussion,
so they did it in our lunch room. And
our lunch room has two monitors that are paired
together. And it's also open enough that anyone could
hear. So they were sitting around the little table
talking, and what I noticed was that there was
a growing crowd of about forty people listening and
looking at the second monitor, the paired monitor.
And they were discussing amongst themselves. They were clarifying
the concepts. Because the super nerds were over here
talking about this really hard concept, and we were
just trying to understand what the hell they were
talking about. But it was really cool to hear
our elders speaking. Like, what do they, what do
they worry about during the day? I don't know.
And, and, and also these, these conversations are normally,
like, closed-door. You don't normally have any impact in
this. And so, being able to like, sort of
listen in was definitely, like, one of the most
enlightening and eye-opening things I think I have seen
in a long time. So I would highly recommend
something like this. And I think this works for
anything. I think this works at the director level.
Like, as long as you're not talking about employees,
I would love to hear what your VPs or
your executives are talking about. Super cool.
And then, I think this is the second to
last one. But the last real one. So, the
last one, I had never heard of this concept,
but now that I see it in effect, I
love it. Basically, when you get a new hire,
assign someone to them for a day. It's nothing
big. Maybe if, maybe if you have, have the
resources, you can assign someone half time for two
weeks. Or maybe even four weeks.
And what I can tell you is that if
you do that, so when New Relic onboards we
think it takes about six months for someone to
truly get up to speed, and I actually agree
with this. What we've found is that if you
have an onboarding buddy helping you through that first
month, it drops to about three months. Which is
crazy. You get one, one engineer's half time for
one month, and that's three months of extra productivity.
That is money. That is a lot of money.
Huge. Huge difference for us.
So, we now do this a hundred percent of
people, come into New Relic and they have a
person guaranteed for four weeks, if not two people,
dedicated to them, in addition to their team. And
one of them is usually me. So very cool.
The last one. Dedicated trainers. Hmm. I wouldn't recommend
it. I mean, unless you have a lot of
people, or the quality of training is, like, absolutely
critical, or. But, it's just, the dedicated trainers have
to be crazy efficient. And so, if you're at
the size where you have two, three, four hundred
people. Yeah. All right. Dedicated trainer time. But most
of us aren't there. Most of us are forty
person companies, right.
You know, I'm just reading the slide. Sorry, I
forget what these are. Yeah. Turn to your neighbor.
Talk very, very briefly. Not three minutes. About what
these have tried, or what, which of these you've
tried and which you think would work in your
work.
And I'll tell you the secrets.
I'm sorry we had to cut that one short.
I'm running out of time. It's all the clapping.
OK. I, my plan for your organization. If you
do this, you will have education and I will
be happy and, and pleased with you. As if
you need to work for my pleasure. So I
want to, to next week, next Friday at 11:30,
I want you to do lightning talks. It's the
easiest thing you can do. It's super easy to
find three people who want to talk. They need
to make three slides. How hard is that?
Also, I want you to ask your team to
review your code at some point. If you're willing,
bring some snacks. And they will like it a
lot better. Third one. Set aside some time for
pairing. Bring your monitor. You know the sneaky monitor
trick now. And also, I think the next time
you have a new hire, try it. I think
you'll find that it's immensely pleasurable and pride-filled endeavor.
For this activity, I would like you to say
these things on the screen. So. Yeah, so. I,
I'm gonna count to three. Because, thank you. I'm
gonna count to three and then we're all gonna
say this thing. All right.
One. Two. Three. Internal education is easy. I'm going
to start on Monday. Yeah! Excellent! I am fulfilled!
You know the two point take away. You don't
need to know everything. You can teach right now.
Education isn't expensive or hard to implement. Chuck just
makes it look that way.