Learning Stuff with Ali Spittel

Matty records at All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the eve of the conference and Matty's first time there, with speaker Ali Spittel. Ali started as a software engineer and moved into teaching code, as an instructional lead and distinguished faculty member at General Assembly, a coding bootcamp, teaching roughly 30 people at a time from zero to professional software engineer. Ali has also found that blogging and podcasting reach a bigger audience than a classroom. Ali is giving a workshop on blogging to gain visibility for open source software, and a talk on teaching code. The cold open is Ali's line: "You have a unique perspective, no matter what your perspective is."

Why Teaching Makes You Better

Ali says that if you're going to advance in a development career you'll end up mentoring, leading a team or moving into management, so knowing how to onboard people and help them learn concepts, not just fix one bug, pays off. Teaching also makes you a better programmer, because people ask questions you'd never think of, and "if you can teach something well, you really know it." Ali took education classes in college, would have been an education minor if they hadn't left to be a software engineer, and got more from them than from computer science classes.

Matty says teaching Chef Fundamentals workshops at customers for two days over and over taught Matty things about the product they hadn't known. Teaching forces you to think about the why, and the process stuff sticks more with some background behind it. Ali's key teaching concept is linking: take what somebody already knows and link it to a new piece of knowledge, because teaching in isolation is "impossible to learn," which is why a first programming language is harder than a second.

Teaching at Scale

Matty asks how to do linking in a big room or a recorded course. Ali's answer is to subtly reteach things several times with different formats, such as diagrams, videos, a code-along and a traditional lecture, and to use different examples for different people. Ali notes that Star Wars tutorials appeal to some, but "my students freak out when I do Britney Spears fans apps." When teaching variables and functions Ali links them back to algebra class.

Matty adds that as learners we think we know more than we do, recalling the swing dancing saying that beginner dancers take intermediate classes, intermediate dancers take advanced classes and advanced dancers take beginner classes. Ali agrees from experience: after years as a software engineer who jumped straight into React, teaching at a bootcamp meant relearning foundational JavaScript from the ground up.

Write It Anyway

Ali says everyone has a unique perspective, and it can be terrifying to publish when someone has done it before. Ali wrote a React tutorial well after the initial burst of React tutorials, sure nobody would read it, and it became the most read post. Matty tells of a SharePoint fix posted on a blog mostly as self-documentation, which an MSDN forum answer then sent thousands of views a day. Matty also says some posts have an intended audience of "future Matt."

Ali has a talk called Yes, You Should Write That Blog Post, about writing for three people: past self, present self, since teaching cements learning, and future self. Ali returns every year to a post on filling out calls for papers. Matty's popular post was on getting a Powerline font working on a Mac in Visual Studio Code, and Ali's was about how they set up computers, "nobody wants to read that. Well, turns out they do."

Making Content Better

Ali's advice is to make it skimmable, since "people don't want to read an essay," with headers, images and lists, and to add the why, what problem this solves, in the introduction. Also appeal to multiple learning styles with code demos, graphics and other formats such as podcasting and video. Matty says lists get people in, and then they find your deeper posts. On talks, Matty calls the why versus how balance "eat your vegetables" and likes single-track conferences for that, and Ali says conference talks aren't the best format for education because people aren't hands-on, so the best thing is to get people excited enough to learn afterward. Matty says attendees asking for more technical content usually mean practical examples.

Getting Read

Ali says the two main channels are social media and search engine optimization. On social media, consistency and being a real person matter. Matty says you don't have to share everything or engage with everyone, "You don't owe anybody a conversation," but to be successful "have some conversations." Ali adds that LinkedIn posts live longer than tweets. For SEO, Ali says to add a couple of keywords but not to keyword stuff, and backlinks come from making good content and relationships, not spamming. Matty adds that when asking for a favor, "don't give 'em more work to do."

Ali recommends cross-posting to a platform with a built-in audience such as dev.to, using a canonical URL so Google knows it isn't duplicate content. Matty suggests the company engineering blog, which is usually "dying for content," and says that cross-posting with a canonical URL helps everyone and is good for recruiting. Matty also says repurposing talks as blog posts and the reverse works well. Ali says making it part of the workday is one strategy for finding time.

Dealing With Criticism

Ali says the number one question in blogging workshops is how to handle people online, and that when criticism gets personal it comes from "a place of hurt." Ali expected the worst from day one as a young woman on the internet, but it didn't happen for about a year, until a post hit the front page of Reddit, so it probably won't be as bad as you think. Ali's own strategy is to write out a response, screenshot it to a couple of close friends, and delete it. Matty says that if you're someone who doesn't have to deal with it, you can be part of a vent network: say that's really shitty, and that you're sorry, and be done. Ali adds not to minimize it, because "nobody should have to deal with that."

Where Ideas Come From

Ali suggests writing the post you were Googling for and couldn't find, writing your own story, or writing about what you want to learn, and Ali's first blog was learning a new technology every week, building an app and writing about it as a beginner. Matty tells of Annie Hedgepeth, who blogged while learning Inspec, and for a long time the project's documentation was that blog. Ali likes ConvertKit's slogan "teach everything that you know" and likes complete beginner guides. Ali's biggest tip is to write down ideas when they come, while walking a dog or Googling, and not when you're looking to write. Matty ends by asking for ideas for 2020 talks on Twitter at @MattStratton and pointing to devopsdays.org/speaking for open CFPs.