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**Ashley Willis:** Yeah, same. I'm here for it. |
**Break:** \[36:32\] |
**Carmen Andoh:** I want to talk a little bit about learning mediums. Each of you has created or taught content in this new world of online, so I would love to talk about your perspectives about pros and cons about each of these mediums. Jon, we're talking about your Gophercises with code, accompanied by videos; Dave, ... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I guess I can start with some of them... I like videos because you can show mistakes. I think it's important, especially for beginners, to see that even experienced developers make mistakes, but also to see how you get to derived code... Because I think there's a lot of times where we'll just show them... |
So I think videos are really good for that interactive -- or not quite interactive, but something like that... But I've also started to find that books are probably more accessible; something that I hate about videos is that you almost need to find translators for a couple different languages, or you need to get somebo... |
So basically that's something I've been struggling with lately, trying to figure out the right approach to that... Because I think that making videos more accessible is something that needs to happen in the future. |
**David Valentine:** \[41:56\] One of the things that I think is important - because I recognize that my courses have reached 160-something different countries - is having good closed captioning. And I have to admit right now my Golang course doesn't have it yet, but to second Jon's thoughts around closed-captioning --... |
The other thing - because I did have a background in teaching outside of this, where I've done some workshops in-person in advance of this type of experience, as well as having tutored one-on-one - is you lose that interaction when you have an online video, and it is extremely difficult to iterate, and make changes. Th... |
I think ideally what I'd almost prefer to do as I grow and continue to make new courses is to teach in a live event, record those, so at least I've got somebody else I'm talking to. And if you see that deer in headlights look, you get that sense of "Oh, okay, I've fallen off track here. I need some more explanation her... |
Mind you, you get unlimited redo's when you're recording video, right? So it's like "Oh, that was -- I need more coffee", or something. So there's pros and cons of each, but everyone has its own flavor and piece to it, right? |
**Ashley Willis:** I feel like every way that we do this is valuable. We all have different learning styles. For me - it's hard for me to consume the content on video. I'm like "Okay, now I have to pause the video, and do this step. Play the video again." And then I go back, "Did I do that step right?" So for me, I lik... |
So video, written tutorials, workshops - they're all valuable in their own way; we all learn differently. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Just to chime in one additional -- one of the reasons I have never focused on workshops, conferences, that sort of stuff as much... And I think it's easy to forget when you live in a city, but there's a lot of people who live nowhere near a city, or they don't have the resources to pay for a workshop, ... |
I think one of the big things I've just noticed is that people find other people to collaborate with and to learn with - that's very huge. |
**Carmen Andoh:** So collaboration, in-person, gauging for deer in the headlights, course correcting - that's typically been the traditional way of learning, right? But it doesn't scale. It doesn't scale the teacher, and it's not accessible to rural and suburban learners. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think it can scale, it just scales differently. One way I've seen it scale is I've seen people who do online courses, and they'll essentially have -- they call them classes, or whatever... But essentially, a bunch of people sign up and they say "Alright, we're gonna start in December, and every week ... |
\[46:12\] I think as course creators, it's things we have to think about... Like, is there a way that we can make that possible? I think tools like Slack have made it much better, too. I've gotten into this habit of -- all the courses I have, I provide support for, but I've gotten into this habit of "Any of the paid of... |
Over time, it's gotten to this point where I can sometimes check the Slack, and somebody asked a question and somebody answered it better than I could have, before I even got to it. |
**Carmen Andoh:** That's great. That's always great, the feedback loops, and in-person for me is when I can get unblocked. I know that the other exercise site that I've tried is Exercism.io, for not just Go, but a variety of languages... And I was a mentor for Go. So when I signed on to be a mentor, they were like "Lis... |
**Ashley Willis:** I love Exercism.io. Thanks Katrina and team. Also, I feel like I need to mention it, because it's great and we haven't talked about it yet, but JustForFunc - I love it. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yeah. And I just wanted to ask Jon, before I talk about other possible resources for gophers... Can you tell us a little bit more about where learners could go for Gophercises? Are they gonna get that content for asking questions within the course, as they sign on? |
**Jon Calhoun:** Gophercises - there's a channel in the GopherSlack, \#gophercises, and there's some people there; I don't know if that one's actually that active... That one's a little bit harder because it's not paid, so supporting it is a little bit trickier. People email me, and I do try to answer where I can, in t... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Great. Well, we're about ten minutes out... Let's go beyond Hello, world or Go 101, and Go 201. We have a great foundational course, and we have exercises - where else can Go beginners go next, once they get there? |
**David Valentine:** I'll jump in there. Once you've got your head around some basic Go, you've done lots of different examples and you have the basic language across, I think at that point jumping into effective Go in terms of learning how to write good, clean, idiomatic Go code is your very next step. Then, as Ashley... |
And then finally, the third thing I'd lead off with in that respect would be to go to Go users groups, because almost any geography that you're in, either there's online forums or in-person groups (especially the in-person groups), you'll find that there are Go user groups. I live in a fairly small city in Canada calle... |
**Ashley Willis:** \[50:12\] Plus one to Go user groups. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yeah, we're actually trying to build that up and strengthen a unified Go user group called The Go Developer Network. I joined Google a couple months ago and I have another colleague that joined the team recently - his name is Van Riper - and he wants to complement GoBridge's efforts, as well as Women ... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think it's a really good thing that that's something you focus on. We talked about all these things with learning languages, but we didn't really talk about the community, or the fact that some coding communities really weren't that inclusive or inviting. I think the fact that Go has stressed that fr... |
**Ashley Willis:** Absolutely. That's why I moved from Python to Go. The Python community is fine, but... So I've found that within the Go community there's no such thing as a dumb question, and I'm really good at asking dumb questions. People are just super, super-helpful; they will go out of their way to help you. I'... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Agreed. And it's the reason I chose Go and stuck with Go, and I just really am happy for that... So yeah, thank you Jon for bringing that up, because it is, I feel, of paramount importance in terms of learning/mastering the language, and then staying and keeping in community and contributing to the la... |
One thing you mentioned, Dave, was Awesome Go. There's also libhunt.com, which I think works for all languages, and then they have go.libhunt.com... Which is a similar thing. You can go see third-party packages, and compare them to other packages, depending on what you wanna do. They release the newest/greatest, and I ... |
I know that Mark Bates, who is a panelist on this show, along with Cory LaNou, they made Gopher Guides, and I think this is along the same lines of trying to find a curated path based on a certain thing that you wanna learn, whether that's a data structure, or a type, or an algorithm... So I'm gonna give a little shout... |
Any other resources for people to go, or go-to's (pun intended)? We've been very short on Go puns this episode. Shame on us. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think one that everybody says and it's very hard, but if you can find an open source project you like, it can be daunting at first, because you'll be like "How do I get started here? There's so much there..." But you mentioned Mark Bates - I think one of the things that he's done a great job with Buf... |
But that one comes to mind because there were one or two people that were very early students of one of the courses I made, and they later were telling me that they were actually contributing more heavily to those projects, and it was because they really helped them grow as a developer, and learn more about them, and g... |
It's not gonna happen overnight. I don't think you can ever, as a beginner, jump into a project and make meaningful code changes, or big code changes. People who run open source projects have to resist this urge to fix a one-line bug; they sort of have to set it aside for a beginner to tackle. But if you can find the r... |
**Ashley Willis:** \[53:56\] I agree. That is advice I give often. And what I would like to see in the future is people prioritizing PRs, like "Here's what's great for a beginner. Here's what's great for people that are more advanced." There's a site called Up-For-Grabs. It's not .com, I can't remember what it is (up-f... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yeah. I love when GitHub tags "Great first issue", and then you can just sort by the tags, and they optimize their project not for getting things done necessarily, but for -- well, yes, that's certainly important, but also for being inclusive and trying to onboard new members into their project or the... |
**Jon Calhoun:** Another one is FirstTimersOnly, where basically they limit specific issues, and you have to be a first-time contributor to that project to do it. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Oh, that's nice. |
**Ashley Willis:** I love it. |
**Carmen Andoh:** And we would be remiss if we didn't mention \#golang-newbies in the GopherSlack. When I first began, I just loved being able to ask, as Ashley said, all the questions. And I was sort of fearless, because I had people that I had already met in person who said "Just ask the question. When you do, if you... |
**Jon Calhoun:** It's funny, because that reminds me of -- before GoTime got rebooted, I was talking to Mat Ryer and he had said that one of his goals was to say "I don't know" in the podcast, at least once or twice... And his goal for that was basically just so beginners realize that it's okay to admit you don't know ... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yes. |
**Ashley Willis:** And there's so much that Mat doesn't know... \[laughter\] |
**Carmen Andoh:** We had to throw Mat some shade... But I think our episode is quasi-complete, because we threw MAt some shade we've given Steve a hello, we mentioned Mark and his Gopher Guides... Anything else we're missing before we go? |
**David Valentine:** Just to add on the question piece, one thing I notice with the courses that I teach - so often someone asks a question, and then next thing you know there's a crowd of me-too's. And I'm like "Where were you a minute ago? Why did so-and-so have to be the first one to ask?" And then inevitably, when ... |
**Ashley Willis:** It's not even unnecessarily shy... I think that people's fear of embarrassment rules them. All psychological. So there has to be somebody in the room who just doesn't embarrass by not knowing something. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think also how you answer can make a huge impact... Because if you make it sound like it was something obvious, or - another example is if somebody says "Well, I'm not sure, but I wanna try to help you", and if you just jump in and just disregard everything they said, then they're not gonna try that ... |
**David Valentine:** Absolutely. |
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