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**Break:** \[20:04\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay, so we were talking about Exercism. The other thing you recently did was the GopherCon talk, which blew many of our minds. I think you really were able to capture and put into words what a lot of us feel about breaking into the language, that we're too close to the problem sometimes because we... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That was an amazing talk. |
**Katrina Owen:** Thank you so much. It was a terrifying talk to do and to prepare. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I don't know, I think you looked like a master up on the stage. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Not only did it resonate with almost everybody in the audience personally, but it was one of the best delivered talks and most compelling slide decks, too. It was the total package: it was a great message, it was a great delivery, and a beautiful slide deck. First time I've seen a presentation where... |
**Katrina Owen:** Thank you. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I died with the Twinkie analogy, too. \[laughter\] |
**Katrina Owen:** The Twinkie analogy is something I think about a lot. For anyone who didn't see the talk, when I read the language spec, I felt like I knew all the words - or almost all the words... There were some that I was completely unfamiliar with, like ebnf notation; that was something I had never actually been... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I've read the language spec a number of times and I continuously go back to it. It's hard to remember all that and put it in context sometimes. It's hard to just kind of read through it. It's small, and most of it we understand, but applying it is completely different. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. The purpose of it isn't really to tell you how to write Go code, it's more to tell you how to implement the Go language. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's true too for alternate compiler implementations. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[24:04\] We mentioned a little bit earlier about idiomatic Go, and I remembered that we had a Wiki resource; there's a code review comments section on the github.com/golang/go/wiki Code Review Comments, and it's what Google uses internally for their code reviews. So if there were no other canonical... |
**Katrina Owen:** It's an awesome document. That and the Effective Go document/project as on my website - both of those are things that I refer to constantly when getting feedback on Go code. It's amazing. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I need to look through the code review comments more often. I know I've looked at it in the past, but it's probably been a long time since I've look at it. It's amazing, especially as you get older, that "out of sight, out of mind." I'll be busy and I'll do stuff and I won't write code for a couple... |
**Katrina Owen:** I actually did an experiment based on one of the exercises on Exercism. I started collecting some solutions that were typical - there might be 10 or 12 different directions that people take a solution in. As I put all of those in a document with the typical feedback that you might get if you go in tha... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So all of this stuff that you're doing really is kind of driving towards teaching people programming, and not just the language, but idioms and how to refactor talks you've done in the past. It seems like a lot of your motivation is to help people learn, and to learn in ways that work for them. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, I'm fascinated by how people learn, and I'm also fascinated by how often we teach people badly. The tools that we put in place, or the systems that we use often work for some people, but not for others, and the result is often that some people are left behind or left out, and left feeling that t... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I love the approach of the small wins and kind of working on these things. We talked to Bryan Liles in the episode prior to the last and some of the same stuff was coming up, too. We talked about needing to have some of those small successes, because if you're just approached with one problem... |
**Katrina Owen:** \[28:07\] What's a text editor? \[laughs\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. Now I need to store stuff in the database, now I need to learn SQL. You get hit with this, and it's easy for us to talk to friends or family or somebody who's interested in it, and be like "Oh yeah, all you gotta do is learn HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. From there, pick a back... |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, we weren't born knowing it either. We forget that sometimes, I think. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And there's so many other things, too. Git and GitHub, that's almost a necessity now, right? Oh, I wanna work on this thing... Before, you just had to unzip something. You just went to the website, you pulled down the TAR files (or the file, depending on the architecture you were working on) and yo... |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now here's this whole other thing, cloning and... |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. I'm helping someone learn how to program, I've been doing that for a while, and they're like "Okay, so I made my first website." It's on their computer and they look at it in their browser using the File:///, right? "How do I put it on the internet?" I was like, "Oh, that's easy. You use GitHub ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Just register DNS... |
**Katrina Owen:** No, it's way easier than the DNS, you don't have to know DNS. You can use GitHub Pages, but of course, then you have to know Git, and that's a painful process. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Right. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** My thinking when I tell people who want to learn to program or are not super experienced yet is "Master your editor and learn Git." Carrie Miller has a great talk about the need to fail to learn things, the need to experiment, and knowing your editor well and knowing Git well will help so much to... |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, I completely agree. There's a new series by Michael Hartl that he and some of his colleagues are working on called "Learn Enough to Be Dangerous" (learnenough.com) The very first thing that he gives you is a tutorial for the command line. Like, "Get just enough command line to be dangerous." The... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I have a friend that's breaking into programming, and I have him developing off of just an Ubuntu Linux machine, just so he can get enough basic commands - moving around, copying files... It's almost a necessity these days. One thing I like about the evolution of Linux is that it's much more approa... |
**Katrina Owen:** \[32:13\] Yeah, that's not very friendly towards newbies who learn to program for the first time. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think a little bit of Linux knowledge... At least being able to SSH and understanding what SSH is. In this day and age, security is a big thing, so understanding a little bit about how firewalls work, cross-site scripting... You can't think about too much of it at once, that's the problem. ... |
**Katrina Owen:** It's easy to make small adjustments for syntax and for standard library stuff, but it really isn't easy to figure out which order to teach those. Like you were saying, DNS and SSH, networking, debugging, troubleshooting... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, understanding HTTP protocol, and cookies, and things like that. And now, I mean, TLS is becoming almost a requirement, so now you have to understand a little bit about that; it feels like we're evolving, but we're making it harder to break into. I used to just throw caution to the wind and dr... |
**Katrina Owen:** ...which, let's say, it totally worked. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. You needed to know how to use an FTP client and that was about it. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Those were the days... Just make sure it's in the right directory, and everything was taken care of. |
**Erik St. Martin:** This is actually an interesting thought, too - would something like Exercism work in learning Linux basics, configuring Apache, or NGINX, or little micro successes there to help people learn the systems level of the field? |
**Katrina Owen:** I think it would work, but I don't know how we would do feedback. I think we could make a lot of very small challenges that people could be successful with, but I don't know how we would look at what they did and say, "You could do it better in this way." |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, you're right, the feedback part, aside from the fact that it works would be difficult. I suppose if you're looking at different ways somebody wrote a systemd unit file or something, you could say "Well, you don't actually want to modify the original, you can do with the overwrites." So I supp... |
**Katrina Owen:** That is actually really useful, having something that basically works, and just change one thing. Or that almost works, and just find the one troubleshoot, one change you need to make - I think that would be a fantastic model. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Here's a container that has a Caddy setup with your blog auto-generating, but a service doesn't start when the container starts, and go! |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that would be interesting, to start thinking about some other things like that that are kind of ancillary bits of knowledge that are required to do what we do. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Talking about ancillary bits of knowledge... Read the errors. |
**Katrina Owen:** \[36:00\] YEAH! \[laughter\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** It's not until you become beaten up by years and years of programming and debugging that you really give in, and "Okay, reading the error log is profitable. I'm going to do it." It's amazing... When people are new to programming you tell them, "Read the error log", and they don't. And you tell th... |
**Katrina Owen:** I would actually ask people, "So what does the error say?" and they would flip back to their terminal and say, "I think what's wrong is...", and I was like "No, no, no... What does the error say?" They're like, "Well, it says that there's...", and I'm like "No, read it out loud, word for word. Tell me... |
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