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**Brittany Dionigi:** Absolutely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you keep in touch with the beginner mindset? |
**Brittany Dionigi:** So I think always be pushing yourself to learn something brand new. And I wouldn't necessarily say always be learning something brand new in tech or in related directly to your job, because you already have some significant level of expertise there that you recognize like on paper, it's your resum... |
I think another part of keeping in tune with your beginner mindset too is, like I mentioned before, always asking yourself "How and why did I know how to do this?" Which I don't -- I mean, it was never a part of my development process when I was in an IC role to be asking myself those questions when I was just coding a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ooh. This could be a precursor to a future show we do. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is actually a deep subject, how do you google, essentially? We want to do a deep dive, we aspire to do a deep dive on all the multi-facets you can do to google a problem set. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes. I'll tell you, having been experienced in specific errors, that the first thing you do is copy and paste the exact text -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Precisely. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...into Google to see if somebody has actually put the text into a blog post and you find an exact match. That's a great way to start. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** From there, you've got other things... But for sure, if you can get the exact error -- now, you may have to scrub like the unique parts out and just normalize it, and get rid of the parts that are unique to you and keep the parts that are general. Otherwise, you're not going to get a hit. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** How do you know what parts are unique to you? Give me an example of a part that would be unique to you in an error message. |
**Jerod Santo:** A timestamp, or if it's like a web request, specific parameters that are put into the thing or, stuff like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The first line of your terminal; not usually somebody else's, I mean -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Your prompt... My prompt says Jerod in it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly. Jerod@macbook, whatever, you know... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. And then what do you do if you scrub all that information out, you have an error message, you copy and paste it, and you don't really get a ton of results, or you get some results that might be related, but kind of vague... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:04\] Right. Then I will often generalize the search query even more. And instead of putting like an entire message in, I'll find like what kind of error it is, and I'll put that in, along with my circumstance, like Alexa 1.12 or something, and then this particular error. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You know, so you're just kind of tweaking it. You're just trying to give Google exactly what it needs to find that. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. And that's something that our engineers, some of our new engineers when I was still in my instructional role - they did exactly that first step, just copy and paste the error message and throw it into Google, but didn't know to take out the file names or parameters or function names that wer... |
So teaching those types of things is super insightful, but most people's first step in teaching that, and where a lot of people stop short, which you didn't, is just copy and paste the error message into Google. Like, go google it, and that's about it. But there's a lot more teachable things in that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yeah, it's kind of the individual steps. I'm thinking about TDD a lot, because you know, in test-driven development you want that first test to fail. And as a person who practices it over time, it's so silly making it fail first, right? It's red/green refactor, and a lot of times we know what th... |
So the intuitive part is actually just iterations of experience where I've realized I can skip the red part -- sorry, TDD purists, but a lot of times I'll just skip the red, and I'll go straight to the green. And everything's fine. You know, the world doesn't end, the program continues to run... And other times I'll do... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. And it might seem silly to teach it that way when it’s something that -- you know, 99% of the time it's going to be fine if I just skip to the green part and head that way... But I think one thing that you're touching on with this is the efficiency of being able to teach that type of stuff a... |
You might've had to iterate and get 100 times of experience going through that process, and maybe they only need to do it 20 times before they get to that same level, because they have that insight, and you've explained that intuition and instinct to them that they needed. |
**Jerod Santo:** It seems like a lot of responsibility on a senior engineer... Not only do you have to be able to do all the things that your job entails, what would be listed on your job, but then also, you have to become a really good teacher and mentor, and help sponsor people... And these are all things that we agr... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Absolutely. I think this is why it does seem to fall to the wayside at a lot of organizations where mentorship kind of takes a back seat to the other high-priority, like, either feature work, or bug fixes, or on-call rotations - everything else that senior engineers have on their plate; mentorship... |
\[20:18\] But the more efficient we get at our instruction and our mentorship, the less of a burden it is on senior engineers, and the more senior engineers you develop, you create, you make that talent with the efforts that you put into your instruction and your intentional mentorship. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is the struggle organizational support of this mentality? This mentality of instructing and cultivating and teaching; not just product feature, go, go, go. Because you have to continuously learn. Software by nature has extreme entropy; it's changing every single day. This very moment, a brand new --... |
How do organizations take this and run with it? Is it a commonality for organizations to embrace this idea for internal education, internal mentorship and sponsorship and supporting it? Because this, to me, takes the margin in an organization to enable that outside of feature set, outside of product. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah. So I think organizations kind of have a lot of different types of goals in this space. There's organizations that might be really ambitious about stuff like this, where they want education first. That's one of their core values. They are trying to prioritize always leveling up their engineer... |
There are other organizations that might have way simpler goals, smaller goals that are simply just "Maybe we want to ramp up our engineers faster. Maybe we want to be able to hire engineers that maybe don't have every single checkbox of technical skills that we're looking for, but we know we can trust that we're going... |
But even those really tiny goals can seem insurmountable for organizations because of how inefficient we are with our instruction and our mentorship right now, because we don't provide any sort of formal training on those types of things. I think a lot of organizations right now lean on providing stipends, like profess... |
**Break**: \[24:26\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're at a place right now then - we're having to teach people how to teach, essentially. If you say that's the place that lacks, is "How do you-- " Sure, I wanna teach. Sure, I believe in education. I don't want to just give you a thousand dollars stipend or whatever the number is to do courses ... |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah, we don't have a lot of experts in this space right now, which is the main blocker. My number one recommendation for organizations would be go seek out engineers who have taught before, have taught at coding bootcamps or do open source education efforts and training courses, and embed them in... |
There's a lot of education-based strategies, classroom-based strategies that you might learn if you had gone to college to be an educator, to be a public school teacher or any other sort of professor, that are pretty unknown to people in the engineering field, because we've never had to learn those types of things. |
\[28:13\] So I think the first step for organizations is a) just being able to identify and leverage any potential learning opportunity that you can create for folks. And those happen at the organization level, they happen at the team level, and they can happen in these more one-on-one intimate levels as well. |
Organizationally, I think -- at Articulate, we've done a couple of things. We've recently partnered with jeli.io. They do incident analysis work. I'm not sure if either of you have worked with them or heard of them in the past... Super-talented people over there, and they helped us facilitate a lot of incident review c... |
**Jerod Santo:** Preparation. |
**Brittany Dionigi:** Yeah, preparation from certain folks, but they allow for a really wide audience and are very focused on like exposure, which is sometimes half the battle. Exposure is 50% of the battle in terms of knowing where to get your answers to your question, knowing that something exists, knowing where to g... |
I think other organizations probably do lots of things, like lunch-and-learns... We also do depth discussions, which are hour-long technical topics that someone wants to present. Things like that are very consistent learning opportunities that you can be creating at the org level. |
And then at the team level - this is where a lot of these classroom-based and educational strategies come into play, I think. Things that we've done on our team, that -- some have worked some, I think, haven't worked, are things like backwards planning; that happens a lot in classroom-based education, where you start w... |
And what we'll do to emphasize that on our team is actually create, like some of our tickets are our cards with that type of information spec-ed out up top before we get into the nitty-gritty of what actually needs to be done. So anything that lends itself to a good learning opportunity, we want to make sure that we're... |
Other areas that we've done on our team - scaffolding is another really common classroom-based strategy, where you're providing a lot of meat and bones and rails and bumpers for someone, and then having them fill in the gaps by really isolating their learning opportunity there. So in engineering, this might look like c... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:34\] There’s a few terms that come to mind - yak shaving, reverse engineering... I think these all kind of play into some of that work backwards aspect. There’s even a really well-known book out there now called Working Backwards, about a lot of Amazon's practices, and how they accomplished Pri... |
**Jerod Santo:** So they wrote the press release first. Is that what I'm hearing? |
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