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Organizing a Conference to Combat Brain Drain in His Hometown with J.C. Hiatt Jul 08, 2019

Show notes

J.C. Hiatt put together the conference MagnoliaJS in the town of Jackson, Missouri to help his community and combat the growing problem of brain drain in his state.

MagnoliaJS is not only for his community, but it was put together with the help of it too. J.C. put it together, publically by using Github issues, blogging, and posting about it on Twitter. The community responds well when you are genuine and trying to do something good, and bringing them in and giving them a sense of ownership is what J.C. attributes as the single most significant contributor to the conference's success.

If you have the opportunity to do something like this for your city, go for it. Bring in as many people as possible, contact your city officials, plan it publically. Technology can have a significant positive impact on a community!

Transcript

"Organizing a Conference to Combat Brain Drain in His Hometown - with J.C. Hiatt" Transcript

Resources

Twitter - Shawn Wang

J.C. Hiatt

John Lindquist

Figuring Out What's Next after Your Needs are Met with Jason Lengstorf Jun 01, 2019

Show notes

What do we do when all of our needs are met when we are making seventy-five thousand plus a year, working for a company with some prestige, have a home, and don't have to worry about food. Jason Lengstorf wrestled with this after the company he was contracting with didn't have anything for him to do, but kept him around. New goals have to be set, and growth still has to happen.

Jason discovered that what he wanted was to help other people grow in their personal and professional lives. To help other people you have to have a set of skills beyond your technical skills, typically these skills would be called "soft skills," but they are often just as important as technical skills, Jason prefers to call these skills "meta" or "catalytic" skills. These are the skills used in planning, bringing people together, decision making, all of these being essential in our careers.

You don't just use these kinds of skills in a software project; they are also the tools that are used to build communities of people. Jason explains how the trick to bringing a group of people together with something is to make everyone feel invested in what they are a part of, and like they belong.

Transcript

"Figuring Out What's Next after Your Needs are Met - with Jason Lengstorf" Transcript

Resources:

GatsbyJS

Jason Lengstorf

Joel Hooks:

Get out of Your Head and Start with Your Users with Janelle Allen May 17, 2019

Show notes

Teaching provides a learner with more information, but the information isn't the only thing that is required to teach effectively. Doing is almost just as essential as the information itself for the learner to solidify what was taught. Creating an effective learning path is challenging, and we tend to start from what we know and take it from there. Janelle challenges the tendency to start from our knowledge, and instead, we should start from where we want our learners to end up being and work backward from there, this is called Backward Design.

Backward design doesn't just apply to education, it applies directly to software development. As developers, it's essential that we get out of our head and start with the user.

How do you start teaching if you have no one to teach? Janelle says there are three critical components to building your audience, having an email list, providing valuable content, and consistency. If you stay genuine and provide value you'll filter out anyone who doesn't resonate with you and what you offer.

Transcript

"Get out of Your Head and Start with Your Users - with Janelle Allen" Transcript

Resources

Janelle Allen:

Twitter

Joel Hooks:

Building Vue Vixens With Education and Inclusiveness With Jen Looper May 14, 2019

Show notes

Jen Looper, developer advocate and the founder of Vue Vixens, didn't study software development in college, she has a Ph.D. in French Literature. Her degree might seem unrelated, but it strengthened her ability to explain complex ideas as well as her overall communication abilities, skills that are essential for her role as a developer advocate. These skills also come into play in her work building the Vue Vixens community, which now has over 20+ chapters all over the world!

The workshop has been a powerful tool for growing the Vue Vixens. Jen explains how the shared experience of learning, eating, and hanging out together can build a lot of lasting connections. Vue Vixens has also branched out from workshops into also hosting meetups, the structure of which is determined by the local chapter leader to suit the needs of their particular location.

But what makes a great workshop? Minimal installation, maximum output. Codesandbox and Nativescript playground have massively cut down on the initial setup times for the Vue Vixen workshops by doing away with all of the installing and installation issues that will always come up. Jen likes to use a cute app project to make the workshop more fun and to make exploring the deeper concepts less dry. To Jen, workshops are about empowerment first and foremost. If a student can leave the workshop feeling empowered and hungry to learn they'll end up much better off than if they learned more but left feeling disinterested.

Transcript

"Building Vue Vixens With Education and Inclusiveness – With Jen Looper" Transcript

Resources:

Jen Looper:

Joel Hooks:

Turning Technical Concepts into Approachable Illustrated Metaphors with Maggie Appleton May 03, 2019

Show notes

There's a kind of "black box" mystery that surrounds illustrators and programmers, to someone who isn't one their skills seem like a form of magic, but to someone who is these skills are just the tools that they've been learning to use through time and hard work.

Maggie is the course logo illustrator at egghead.io, and she has the challenge of turning the concepts being taught in the course into something more visually concrete. The challenge isn't necessarily the drawing, but the research that is needed to understand a topic to the point of being able to create an accurate metaphor that people who don't know what is being taught can grasp. Maggie discusses her process in research and creative thinking to get to that point.

The beginner's mindset is critical to Maggie for creating these illustrations. When someone becomes an expert in something, they tend to overlook things that have become muscle memory to them that make beginners struggle. You don't have to be an expert to teach something to someone! The problems that you ran into when learning a topic and the things that helped you wrap your head around it are still fresh in your mind and can be extremely valuable for other beginners and even those with experience.

Maggie started a site called illustrated.dev to bring visual learning perspective of web development and internet concepts. There is a lot of content out there that teaches with language, but for many people, that style of learning makes it difficult for things to click. Never be afraid to teach things that are already being taught, often it is the way that you teach that matters most.

Transcript

"Turning Technical Concepts into Approachable Illustrated Metaphors - with Maggie Appleton" Transcript

Resources:

Maggie Appleton:

Joel Hooks:

Being Curious and Facilitating the Success of Others with Stacey Mulcahy Apr 29, 2019

Show notes

JavaScript fatigue is a topic that has been trending for a while now. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the constant influx of new technology, but it's also thrilling to learn the latest cool new thing! Stacey Mulcahy discusses how she embraces this deluge of technology by being a generalist, allowing her to make connections with more people than she would have if she specialized in one thing.

Stacy is a Maker, a kind of tech-based DIYer and inventor. Creativity is, of course, important for the DIY hacker, but it's essential for everyone else too. Creativity is creative problem solving, and it's something that you can train. If you aren't "working your creativity muscle," your creative skills are going to degrade. Try to push the envelope and find outlets where you can apply your creative skills!

Like a lot of people in the tech world, Joel has a box of Arduino stuff that is gathering dust somewhere. How do you get past that initial "hello world" LED blink project? Stacey recommends to immerse yourself, see what other makers are doing and find inspiration from them. Try to find something that you enjoy and find fun and see if you can do it with an Arduino.

Lastly, Stacey tells us her story of what caused her to begin teaching children technology, and how she got to where she is now. It's rewarding to celebrate people's successes and provide them with a space where they can fail safely. If there isn't a community meetup for something you enjoy in your area you have the complete ability to start one yourself and be the organizer. There are multiple platforms that help organize events. The key for your community to grow is to be consistent with it.

Transcript

"Being Curious and Facilitating the Success of Others - with Stacey Mulcahy" Transcript

Stacy Mulcahy:

Joel Hooks

Creating Authentic Content and Developing Yourself with Emma Bostian Mar 28, 2019

Show notes

Web development is a fantastic field where people, for little to no money, can self-teach everything you need to make a career, and it's amazing, right? That doesn't mean that there isn't a time cost though, it isn't easy, but the internet has an overwhelming amount of information that you can use to teach yourself. Authors who write this free content are the life-blood of the internet and provide an invaluable service to countless people.

However, in the sea of information, it's easy for your content never to get noticed. You wrote that blog-post that killer blog-post on medium, but no-one seemed to have seen it. Where you write your content is important, there are communities like the amazing dev.to that reach a specific audience and are more focused towards engagement, but the reason why you create your content is also important. People can smell inauthenticity if you are writing your content for the sole purpose of brand-building and getting views people are going to notice. Create content that you love and that you find interesting. You don't even have to be an absolute expert to teach, writing about what you are learning helps people learn right along with you!

Learning a discipline you love profoundly is invaluable, but that doesn't mean you should turn a blind eye to other subjects. It's valuable to have a breadth of general knowledge across different disciplines and be able to have high-level conversations.

A huge part of learning is asking people good questions. When you don't ask good questions, you are doing both yourself and the person you are asking a disservice. When you are too vague about what you are missing, and you don't give enough context, it's difficult to get a clear answer, and you are putting the burden of figuring that stuff out on the person you are asking.

Resources:

Emma Bostian:

Joel Hooks

Heading Gatsby's Learning Experience and Bridging Gaps with Marcy Sutton Mar 15, 2019

Show notes

Marcy Sutton is the Head of Learning at GatsbyJS, but what does that mean? One of Gatsby's core focuses is the community, and a part of that is making the experience with Gatsby as friendly as possible. A large part of making Gatsby friendly is having excellent documentation, so that learning and debugging experiences would be smooth.

So the learning experience is smooth but what is Gatsby's potential on the web? Marcy talks about how Gatsby has the potential to make a huge impact. Currently WordPress is powering about a third of the web, that's huge, but it has its issues. WordPress is centered around the authoring experience but the front-end experience is not good. Gatsby is looking more towards the future, it doesn't use a database, it can build out static HTML, it's accessible, and it's also democratizing the experience with a themes ecosystem.

This brings up the point that JavaScript is eating the web and it's making it more difficult for folks who've had a different intro to webdev. This is a real challenge and people are having their careers impacted, what can we do to reconcile this? The decisions made by tech teams aren't considering this when the pick the technologies that they use, they're picking tech that's going to deliver a high preformance application, where does HTML and CSS fit into this? Marcy discusses how we can bridge the gap and find ways to include people with different skill sets.

Marcy also discusses the inclusive community that she has helped build, NW Tech Women, a small group out of Bellingham WA that hosts social events, but also volunteers and pairs with non-profits to make a community impact.

Transcript

"Heading Gatsby's Learning Experience and Bridging Gaps - with Marcy Sutton" Transcript

Resources:

Marcy Sutton:

Joel Hooks

Making Dumb Stuff That Makes Strangers on the Internet Smile with Sara Vieira Mar 12, 2019

Show notes

Sara Vieira, developer advocate and professional maker of dumb shit, talks through why she does her weird experiments on the internet. Sometimes it is out of need, but honestly a lot of the time it is a random thing that she thinks of or something that someone says that brings up the idea, and she just has to make it. A lot of it is out of boredom, and also procrastination from other projects that she just doesn't want to do.

Sara calls herself a lazy developer, but that doesn't mean she isn't working. She finds simpler solutions that involve less coding and also avoids things that aren't necessarily interesting or fun for her to do, like CSS or writing her talk for a conference... A part of being a lazy developer is using the right tool for the job. GraphQL and Redux have an almost cult-like following, but for small apps, their solutions for state management and fetching data are complete overkill.

Netlify and Zeit's Now are great for deploying your projects, they allow you to get your unique dumb-shit out there quickly. There was this period where services were all focusing on scalability, but it wasn't easy to just throw your wacky side-projects out on the internet.

Sara is organizing the conference ReactJS Girls which will be happening in London on May 3rd, 2019. It started last year while Sara was living in London. She hosted a meetup where all the speakers would be women, but everyone was welcome to attend as a guest. Organizing it this way had multiple benefits, it acted as a filter for the dicks who wouldn't want to learn from women, and it empowered first-time speakers who'd otherwise feel imposter syndrome or fear of judgment.

Transcript

"Making Dumb Stuff That Makes Strangers on the Internet Smile - with Sara Vieira" Transcript

Resources:

Sara Vieira:

Joel Hooks

Developing Yourself While Teaching Others with Ali Spittel Feb 22, 2019

Show notes

Today we are joined by Ali Spittel, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at dev.to, who speaks with us about:

The skills she gained from a developer teaching job
How she kept up on her coding skills without writting production code by doing daily code challenges
Why she began to blog and how she made a habit out of it
Blogging on a platform vs having your own website
Using visual feedback to teach beginners to code
Involving herself in the local developer community

Transcript

"Developing Yourself While Teaching Others - with Ali Spittel" Transcript

Resources:

dev.to

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