RailsConf 2014 - Building kick-ass internal education programs (for large and small budgets)

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.