Lessons Learned:
A Developer's Perspective
on Teaching and Learning

Leah Garrett

About Me

• 20+ years software development
• Hiring, training and mentoring developers
• Worked at University as tutor and lecturer
• Ran a six month coding bootcamp
• Part of the team that organises the DDD Melbourne conference
• Co-organiser of the Melbourne Golang Meetup group

Objectives of this talk

• to share my experiences
• to pose lots of questions and not answer them all but set directions
• to evaluate what works and what doesn't

How to teach the "best" way to do things

• It Depends
• You don't know what you don't know
• Asking good questions
• Learning to ask for help

Learning techniques
at work

Brown bag / lunch and learn

• Informal lunchtime session
• Can be a presentation, a discussion, a workshop
• Can be on any topic
• Can be a one off or a series

Pair programming

• Two developers working together on the same code
• One developer is the driver, the other is the navigator
• Can be used for learning, mentoring, problem solving, code reviews
• Can be done in person or remotely

Code reviews

• Reviewing code before it is merged into the main codebase
• Can be done in person or remotely
• Can be done by peers, seniors, juniors
• Can be done by a team or an individual

Onboarding / interns

• Formal or informal process of introducing new staff to the company
• Engage a variety of people across the company in a variety of activities, shadow people for short or extended periods
• Novice program - onboarding new developers

Formal education

University

• 3-4 years full time
• Structured learning over a few hours a week
• Some practice
• Lectures with theory and passive listening

What this looked like for me

• Working full time as a developer
• Thursday afternoon off to lecture Java
• Evening classes, labs, tutorials, hands-on
• Other peoples content

Bootcamp

• 3-6 months full time
• Semi-structured learning, 9am - 5pm classrom time
• Students told by staff "think us us as your guides, not your solution book"
• Students follow along, don't explain everything
• Show, don't tell

No glossary required

• No formal introduction of terms or theory
• Lots of practice

One day Workshop

• Semi-structured learning
• Attendees follow along coding straight away, don't explain everything
• Objective to break the ice on the tech and get people started

Bootcamp style approach

• No formal introduction of terms or theory
• Lots of practice

One day Workshop - Considerations

• No knowledge of audience and who is doing the course and why - try to ask at the start and target examples to audience
• No constraints to guide content
• If you are running a workshop internally you can focus on problems to be solved with Go

Consider previous language experience

• JavaScript - type safety
• PHP, Ruby - speak to structure and patterns

Content Considerations

• Trade offs between small examples and large examples that might mean some people behind but engage more interest
• Assuming people like solving logic puzzles, create ways to ask questions;
  what would be a better way? Could we do this differently? eg: the left strategy, avoid nested `if` statements

Consider making an impression

• Show off some Go features to capture interest eg: `defer`
• The extent of features in standard library - students surprised with testing being built in

Consider impact of Generative AI

• IDE auto complete standard examples
• ChatGPT to build solutions

Informal learning
outside of work

Meetups

• Informal gathering of people with a shared interest
• Can be a presentation, a discussion, a workshop
• Can be on any topic
• Can be a one off or a series

Workshop meetup

• Short time frame
• Variety of attendees
• Scripted to allow for people catching up and racing ahead

Meetup Coding
Challenge idea

• People enjoyed hearing about an attempt at the One Billion Row Challenge (July Meetup)
• There was lots of questions and suggestions
• Wanted to duplicate that energy

Criteria

• Something that was easy to explain
• Code needed to fit on one screen for presentation
• Wanted to target performance

Coding Challenge Objectives

• Small coding example - easy to see on screen
• Go deep exploring options
• Think of many different implementations
• Code up on github

Started using code from Dave Cheney

• Word Count implementation
• Read through every character to find words

Over several meetups

• address buffer changes recommended by Dave Cheney
• look at loop performance
• look at byte shifting

Tooling

Wasted a lot of time running and re-running on branches to compare performance. Introduced Benchmarking in the follow-up session.

Started to look at bit shifting

Does it need to be so complicated?

Performance vs readability

• Weigh up tradeoffs
• A safe place to explore and try things

Open ended problem

• How fast does it need to be?
• Supporting large files?
• Lack of constraints expanding the problem arbitarily
• How much time would you spend?

Best practices discussions

Started as discussion in the coding challenge and ended up as a talk.

• Don't speculatively optimize code without profiling
• Don't always need goroutines
• Don't need to pass by pointer

Knowledge from prior languages

muscle memory working against us

Would I do the
code challenge again?

Yes

What I would change

• Consider announcing earlier so people could make a PR before session
• Consider asking people to take turns at keyboard
• Introduce benchmarking earlier
• Use tests to confirm validity of word count

Considerations when
running internally

• Open ended implementation to motivate need for tooling and contraints
• Highlight the need to ask questions
• Without restrictions can end up with unexpected learnings

Call to action

• Try a variety of learning techniques
• One training or learning technique may not address all your training needs
• Trying a variety may leads to new and unexpected learning outcomes

References

• Inspiration for the coding challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nok0aYiGiYA
• Starter code inspired by https://github.com/davecheney/gophercon2018-performance-tuning-workshop/blob/master/4-profiling/examples/words/main.go
• Coding challenge code https://github.com/leahgarrett/go-coding-challenge

References

• Gophers from
  https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/gophers
• Slides built with
  https://revealjs.com/