 Hey there, my name is Lenora and today I'll be talking to you about how to learn Ember in 2021. This is based on my journey of learning Ember as a designer in 2020 and my dad during a global pandemic. Learning during a global pandemic is so hard. However, without the help of the Ember community, my mentors, and Pure Willpower, I don't know if I can find through it. Do you want to know more about how I did it? Keep on watching. I'll just pour some tea while I'm at it, you know? So, let's set the scene. So it is about the 18th. I, Lenora, just accepted her first silicone valley roll, right? That's like groundbreaking if you're from any other place outside of the silicone valley. Just accepted my first silicone valley roll at Heroku as a senior product designer. Before all of this, I was a ninth grade math teacher teaching algebra one to students in my hometown, Miami, Florida. I guess I just didn't see how that opportunity would have shaped my entire future going forward, but it really did. To go back into time and see, boom, now I'm a senior product designer for a silicone valley top-notch company working for some of the best designers I've ever been around in my life. I'm like, who would have thought? As I started to work and started to get acquainted with the Heroku design system and what Heroku needed feature-wise, I started to see more opportunities to be able to contribute to our design system via coding. So, I want to take the leap. I want to take the leap because I was very passionate about that gap and I'm still passionate about it. I'm passionate about filling the gap between design and engineering. I'm passionate about being able to fill the gap between design and engineering communication. I'm, you know, very passionate about making sure that the designers and the engineering team is in line. They have parity, they talk, they communicate. I'm all about that piece, that gap. And the more I just started to work with the team, I'm like, I think I want to fill that gap. I'm more comfortable in that gap. Please give me that gap. An opportunity arose and I took it. Now, the opportunity wasn't presented to me in a, hey, here is a gap title. The opportunity is presented in a way of, here's a software engineering title. Now you have to learn, Amber. And I'm like, oh wait, I didn't ask for all that. But at the same time, I'm like, hmm, this is a good challenge. I love challenges. Let's go, right? So my trajectory into learning, Amber, yes, it was a little nuanced. But at the same time, I feel like as a total beginner, I chugged it to Amber without any knowledge of it. And now I can call myself a learner or a novice or a person who can actually do things using Amber. Because of the pandemic, I've had to revise my learning plan a ton. I couldn't go to the conferences I wanted to go to. I couldn't meet the folks I really wanted to meet. I couldn't hug the people I wanted to hug. So a lot of my time was spent cultivating relationships via social media. And honestly, so what I wanted to show you today was, you know, how those learnings happened. I went through failures. I went through success. I went through, I don't know this. I'm defeated. I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore. I went through all of those things. And I've gotten out on a, to me, much better space when it comes to Amber. If you are a new learner, this talk is for you. If you are a mentor, this talk is for you. If you are someone who believes in a phrase, always be a beginner. This talk is definitely for you. Let's get started. So I'm going to bring my computer up just so that I can follow along with you all. So what will we talk about today? Number one, the mindset of a beginner. This is a foundational work. You need to do this part just so you can cultivate your mind and get prepared for this journey. This journey is a long journey and you need to be in the right mindset for this type of growth. Number two, pre-curriculum, prep work. This is where you do some research on yourself. You figure out how do you learn? How long do you want to learn? Are you better in the mornings? Are you better at night? Are you better during the day? How best can you maximize your learning? Number three, we're going to focus on creating your learning curriculum. From here, this is more of a structured guide. Okay, 30 days. This is what we're going to be doing. Here's your goals. Here's what you're going to be learning. Here are your weekly to-dos. Here's your daily to-dos. This is where we break down our actual learning goals. Number four, we're going to be talking about this method. It's called try, fail, learn, and repeat. This is one of my favorite pieces of the entire presentation, to be honest with you. It talks about my entire journey when I failed, how I got back up, what trying looked like for me, what practice looks like for me. This is the actual practice hustle grind part of it. So yeah, let's go. Mindset of a beginner, preparing yourself, like I said, foundational pieces. This is what we all need to prepare our minds. Preparing for a new learning journey. Your mindset can make or break your learning journey. I get it. Who wants to be the incompetent one? Or the one with the least knowledge in the room? Everyone wants to be able to contribute to their team, to contribute to themselves and their future. However, we cannot be that rigid with ourselves. We have to give ourselves grace. We have to give ourselves some kind of flexibility. In my opinion, to me, the best way to cultivate a growth mindset or a forever learner mindset is to accept and own your curiosity. I know that children, we all forgot that. We forgot that. We no longer do it. But when we get to the mindset and the place of owning our curiosity, it would open up so many doors. I mean, it'll be a place where we can imagine endless possibilities. We could stop all limiting beliefs. We can go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. That part, the last part, without losing enthusiasm. That one's hard. That one is very hard. However, you have to get to that curiosity where you don't even care if you fail. That's strong curiosity. That's the kind of curiosity that will never waver. That's what you need. So I'm just going to say it one more time to create and cultivate a really good beginner mindset you need to own and accept your curious mind. With that being said, do you remember how being curious made you feel? Do you remember your first time being curious? Well, if not, allow me to reintroduce you to your curious mind. We're going to be watching a scene from my favorite movie, Up. Give me one second. Adventure! As Carl was, I mean, he was so curious that he risked walking into an abandoned house. Like, whoa. That's how curious you need to be. That's how open to curiosity and open to adventure that you'll need to be when you embark on a new learning journey. Let's put it on our jetpacks and move on to our next point. And that is the pre-periculum stage, the pre-work. How long will this even take? Research says it takes 10,000 hours to learn a new skill. That was quoted in the book The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. And he also cited it from a journal article in 1993 by someone named Anders Erickson. And Anders studied how, well, what it took to be the best in a particular field like sports, medicine, music, et cetera. So he studied these people until he realized, oh, these people take around 10,000 hours to be masters at their craft. So I wanted to do the math. I'm like, okay, let's put this in perspective of a 40-hour work week. So you have 40 hours times 52. That's 52 weeks in a year. So you get 2,080 hours. 2,080 hours, to me, covers your entire year approximately. 10,000 hours divided by 2,080 hours. That gives you 4.8 years. If that's the case, it takes you about five years to become a master at your craft. Now remember I said master. Anders Erickson debunked what was going on in the Outliers book and let everyone know that is not what I said. What I said was it takes you 10,000 hours to master, not to learn a skill. Does not take you that long to learn a skill. Later on, Jacob Kaufman of the first 20 hours, he theorized that it takes 20 hours to learn a skill. 20 hours is pretty doable. So now that we understand how long it will take, let's move on to our second point. And that is what's your learning style. When it comes to learning styles, I can never choose one. I'm learning all of them. But it all depends on how familiar I am with the topic. So if it's my first time learning particular skills, or if it's my first time using Ember, then I'm more of a visual learner. I could watch the choreo and not do it. I could look at pictures and illustrations through the guides, but I will not actually put those things in context. I just want to visualize it, get a sense of it. As time goes on and I become a little bit more familiar with it, I'm more of an auditory learner. At this point, I can turn on an audio book. I turn on a podcast. I can turn on some kind of like screen reader to listen to a blog post. I can do that because now I can visualize it. I don't need to see it. I can visualize what they're talking about. So number three, I made note of the subject, but I'm not proficient in it. When it comes to that, I am totally a hands-on learner. I need tutorials. I need to actually put my hands to the actual code. I need to study. I need to pair with other people. I need to rubber duck. I need all that. I need all the hands-on training I can get. And then the last one, if I'm not proficient in it yet, but I can do enough to be dangerous, I think it's time for me to teach. I think you don't know when you don't know until you teach someone else. That means teaching your parents, teaching via social media, learning out loud, which is what I usually do when I want somebody to learn something, but I also want the accountability piece. I will learn out loud. Hence, I did a few things while I was learning. Every morning at 5 a.m., I would learn out loud via Twitch and people would watch me learn. So what I'm going to do right now is just show you exactly what I mean by that. I have broken down my resources based on my learning styles. So you have your visual. These are all of the tutorials that I watched. They were very small, easy to digest. Then I move on to my auditory learning. These are the podcasts. These are, you know, the weekly newsletters. Then I move on to hands-on learning. Hands-on learning are the actual tutorials. My north was probably one of my faves. Gavin Joyce, chefkiss, loved it. Then I move on to teaching opportunities. Teaching opportunities were me going on Twitch and learning out loud. Emory Kumpf, I'm right here. Beginner is my week at work, where I did a mob parent session with all the developers of my team. And a few of the Instagram posts that I created around Ember, just showing, highlighting what I've been learning and some of the tutorials that I've completed. Lastly, I've been reading. I don't like reading, but I do like it once I'm familiar with the subject and I'm curious about it. I can read all David. But I have to like train my mind to want it. So, reading, I have all the books that I've read, like the Lit Erdies book, Rock and Roll with Ember, I have the newsletters, I have pro-Ember data, that's one of the books that I recently bought, so I can understand data better, but yeah, you get the point. Then I have my social media accounts. I feel like this is one of the underutilized areas. You have to get surrounded and embedded in the community without the people that's a part of the community. You won't really know what's going on. So, get embedded, join into a community. And then of course, I have your open source projects that you contribute to. This is another easy method of learning. So, I created this compile list just so I can always go back and visit it and see what I need and what I can grab from. So, let's move on to our next piece and that is creating your first curriculum. In the spirit of the first 20 hours book, I decided to play it on my first 30 days. 20 hours is usually one hour for two weeks, but I thought if I'd spanned it, it was 30 days. That won't hurt. So, I spanned it for a month and I plan out my 30-day learning curriculum. I write out my goals. Where do I want to level up? This particular example, I discussed that I wanted to level up in all Ember core concepts. I make a plan. So Monday through Friday, I do tutorials and learning. And that will be at 5 a.m. one hour a day, a minimum of one hour. If I go over that, that's fine, but a minimum of one hour a day is totally fine. And on weekends, I take my breaks. Always make room for breaks. Always give your brain rest. So, third, we have proficiency metrics. And with proficiency metrics, I basically wrote down all the topics that I really want to understand. So, if anyone ever asks me, hey, Lenora, what's a model? I'll know exactly how to answer them without hesitation. Number four, preferred learning resource. I picked one learning resource for those 30 days, especially the first 30 days. I do not want to mix my learning. I use Blip, Erdies, Rock and Roll with Ember. And that's just what I stuck with. The last thing is weekly study plan. So, with my weekly study plan, I will literally write out week one, do these things. Week two, read chapters three through six and do these things. I had a very structured learning. So, let's move on to our weekly daily plan. With my weekly plan, it was more like it was notes. It wasn't really like rehashing what I'm going to do. It's mostly notes. So, each week, I'll read ahead to look at what topics will be covered. And I'll categorize them by what I already know, the areas that I kind of know, and then the completely new areas that I have no idea what they are. I've even added a section called phrases brought up at work. Now, let me explain why I did that. So, one day, my mentor, he talked about Ember concurrency. And I'm like, oh, let me write that down. And I started researching and learning about it. The next day, I'm like, yeah, he don't struggle with Ember concurrency. He's like, Laura, what are you doing? That's not why I talked about that. I was working on that. But that's not something you need to worry about. You need to focus on the foundational pieces when I'm not Ember concurrency. So, I would definitely say, save those phrases for later. It will definitely come back and it will definitely help you out later in the future. That's for your future self. But for your now self, you just focus on your foundational pieces. But write down when you hear different things that you'd like to explore later. In an effort to learn out loud, I would basically post my notes via social media. Let's move on to part three, mentors, coaches, and community. This is one of my favorite parts. These are all of the amazing folks who've helped me. Who've helped me cultivate my career. Who've helped me learn Ember. I would like to point out to you people, Jamie and Micah. Jamie and Micah did an amazing job at cultivating a relationship with me early on, so that when it was time to coach me or mentor me, it was like butter. Jamie was more of a coach where he was a lot more hands-on. He's like, hey, let's actually do the work. You drive, I watch. If you run into issues, I'm here. But you go ahead. Micah was more of the, no, tell me what you know about models. Tell me what you know about template files. Explain to me what you think you know. It was more of that I had to talk to you about it. Honestly, everyone's teaching style worked out perfectly for me. It helped me keep track of things. And yeah, if you have time to build up your mentorship and your coach tribe, please do that early on. There are so many communities available, especially within the Ember community, that will help you ramp up and will help you get the coaching you need. And yeah, I don't think there is an actual coaching program, but everyone's so helpful that you indirectly get the coaching. Like for instance, I have people that's our friends in the community. I don't talk to them every day, but whenever I send the PR in, they send me feedback. They allow me to understand what I did wrong and they help me learn how to do it better. So that's still coaching within yourself. So, how did this all work out for me? For overall. With that said, I would like to move on to a scene from the movie. Up! Yep, it's back. Shit and Burn was a person. It'll be me. I promise you all, trying to learn Ember, I mean, it wasn't like it was hard. It was just, you really needed to pace yourself. And in my perspective, without a coach or without deliberate practice with someone guiding me, saying, yeah, you may not want to do that yet. Do this instead. Without a coach, I probably would have gotten as far as I have gotten. You can plan out your learning. You can structure your day. You can do all of these things. But there's nothing like having deliberate practice via a guide resource and consistency that will really pull you along the path. There's plenty of times where I'm like, all right, cool. I'm going to practice. I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to learn. And I couldn't get through a small little Pomodoro. It's like, come on out. You're talking about going to learn, but you're not even doing your due diligence. So I would tell you all, if you feel like giving up, that is a natural feeling. If you ever feel like giving up, own it. Own it when it comes time to take a break. If it's time for your break, listen to your body. Listen to your body when it tells you to stop. Listen when it tells you to go to the beach. Listen when it tells you, hey, you know, that was nice. You tried. But let's give our brain a rest because right now we're trying to reconstruct those new neural pathways and you're interrupting. So let us help you. Please rest. Listen to it. Listen to it and take your rest. So I do want to let you all know that when it comes to this journey, you will need to take rest. And sometimes that could last two weeks. Sometimes like less than a month. Take your breaks. There is a quote that I found on Instagram not too long ago. It said, passion lights the way while discipline paves the road and hope is the fuel. Not sure who created it. I tried to Google, couldn't find it. I thought I would change it up a bit. I think it should be passion lights the way while discipline paves the road and making it personal is the fuel. Now during those moments that I just talked about where you feel defeated, where you feel like, oh my gosh, this is it. I can't do it anymore. I'm done. That's the time I feel like you need to try that try, fail, learn, repeat method where you make it personal. Create a personal project. I created my personal project right in the very beginning. So remember those 30 days I talked about? I created my personal project during that time. When I realized the way to create a Ember project, all you need to say is Ember new in the app name. I'm like, all right, cool. Ember new mad reminder. And the reason why I created this was for a special guy in my life. It's my dad and my dad went through a few things growing up. When he was in his 20s, he basically met up with some police brutality and he was hit in the head by a baton so hard to a split his skin. And if you take a look at the actual skin, you can tell that someone stitched it up really badly. So that means that either he was, he went to jail and they stitched it up any way they wanted to. And I don't know what happened after that. I don't know whether he sat in the jail cell. I don't know. I have no idea. But he survived it later on had me. And now, as a 50 year old, six year old person, he's having issues with his brain, with remembering, with dementia. There was a time where he would get severe headaches and he would be like, hey, I've got to pull over on the side of the road. And I always questioned it, but I didn't really understand. I was a kid, so I didn't know. But it wasn't until one day in 2000, oh wait, what was that? 2006, where he actually passed out. And when he was rushed to the hospital, they found an aneurysm. And if you know anything about aneurysms, aneurysms are extremely deadly. 60, 60% of people survive. Now 60% is very close to 50%. So that's like half of the amount of people survive this thing. And 66% of the survivors have permanent neurological damage. Well, that's my dad. He has extreme short term memory. I'll tell him something today and he'd like, wait, what did you say? The next second. So he can't remember things that happened long ago, but he can't remember what happened today. And that creates a problem when it comes to him taking his medication and taking it on time, remembering to take it. So I created a personal project to help this special man of mine remember to take his medication. So basically it's an embrap. It has a daily tracker. And right now he's on track. He has taken his medication alone by itself without needing any assistance. And basically my dad is young. He's not like in his 70s or 80s or 90s. He's young. He's like, I don't want you to keep coming here to like give me my medicine because you think I'm going to overdose. And I'm like, well, would you take this app just so you can keep track of it? And so I can also keep track of it without like bug me you were calling you every day. So this app will allow me to peek in on what he's doing but also allow him to remember if he already took it. So there's dashboards all over the house or he'll be able to see. Hey, yes, I did take my medication already. All right, cool. I'll take it again. So this is how it works. I kind of guess I didn't really explain that. So it sends him a text message in the morning. Hey, did you take your epilepsy medication or whatever other medication he has? Did you take it? And if he presses number one or if he sends one as a response, it will basically send back to Ember letting them know, hey, perfect. This person took their medication on time if it was within that time gap. And they'll give us a check mark. If the person did take the medication but it was late, it will put on the right side taking epilepsy medication, but it was late. Just to let me know what's really going on and if I really need to talk to the doctor or let them know, hey, he took it but he still had a seizure later on that day or he took it and he didn't have a seizure. I want to keep track of those things. So with that police brutality moment, later on he started to occur seizures, severe seizures. And my dad has ketonic seizures. So you don't even know what he's having a seizure. He's just quiet and he's just assuming the most part of you and then you realize, oh my God, he's having a seizure. So I wanted to create a app that helps me with that. So in my perspective, I feel like if you make something personal and you pull out your heart strings, you will learn. There's plenty of times I put this application down because I couldn't figure out how to get Tulio to talk to Inverter. I'm like, all right, I'll put it down for now. And then when I learned something new at work, I'm like, oh cool, I've got it. I can go back to my project and add that piece, that missing piece that I was looking for. So my advice is when you're learning something new, create a side project, create something personal. And that will keep you going when times are low. So if this inspired you in any way, here are some action items. If you are a newcomer to Inver, I would like you to be welcomed into this space. I want you to join the Discord community. I want you to contribute to the open source projects. I want you to create your own curriculum. And if you do not know how to create it, I would love for you to go to my GitHub. I'll have a starter pack there. Or you can just quickly fork down a Inver learning resource or a learning plan and go forth. Learn, I love. If you are a mentor or a coach, I would like you to let your mentees know how to learn deliberately. I want you to navigate them. Tell them, hey, no, don't learn Inver concurrency. Learn about templates. Learn about functional helpers. Learn about other things, but not this just yet. I want you to put them on a path of success. And I feel like if you do that, it will help them create an environment where they are challenged. Yet they can still achieve the tax you're asking. If you are an Inver community leader, I would tell you to encourage newcomers as much as you can. If you're on social media and you hear about someone saying they want to learn Inver, encourage them. Bring more people in. There's so many people that's ready to learn a new language. And honestly, the community will be the it factor. Our community at Inver is, in my opinion, the it factor of what made me stay. I could have gone to any community, but the Inver community was so, so welcoming and I was so about it. And honestly, that's the only reason that I stuck so closely. How to contact Lenora. So if you want to contact me, here's my Discord. It's Lenora Porter, Twitter, Lenora Porter, Instagram, Lenora Porter, GitHub, Lenora Porter, Twitch, Lenora Porter, YouTube, Lenora Porter, and my website, LenoraPorter.gov. Basically everything is Lenora Porter. So if you do want to reach out to me, I am at Lenora Porter. If you need any more helpful guides, how to learn coding, or how to learn during a pandemic, let me know. I would love to be a resource to you. Thank you so much for listening to my talk. See you later.