I love this one. π
Sean recently ran an online seminar on building REST API's with Rails. In this episode they go through what worked well & what could have gone better.
My favorite points:
- Humanize yourself quickly - when teaching less experienced developers, you need to be relatable. An easy way to do this is through live coding. They'll see your missteps & thought process, showing that you're more similar than they may think.
- When teaching, use a simple topic. Keeping it simple allows you to focus more on the building, rather than learning about what to build (in this case, building a blackjack game vs something simpler)
- Find out everyones expectations from the beginning. Then at the course goes on, you can calibrate and be sure to hit everyones goals. By doing that, everyone goes away happy.
- Opening up a Slack chat a couple days early lets the participants get to know each other better / makes the course smoother.
- Online seminars are nice because they open up learning to a wider group of people. The time commitment/$ commitment isn't as large as traveling to a conference. It's more accessible for people who cannot do that.
What did I miss? π
Thanks for posting this :) "Real world testing" was definitely a big takeaway too. Attendees were pretty interested in that topic, and TDD was far less common of a practice than I would have expected.
@barelyknown I loved that point. I've noticed that too. I do a fair amount of mentoring Jr. developers. The live coding TDD is super popular with them as well. "Makes it real" π
PlanetScale Boost