 Okay, instead of the the normal introduction where I talk about who I am cuz I know you don't care I'm gonna ask you a question instead. The question is What was the first food that you learned to cook by yourself? Peanut butter and jelly ramen noodles. What else? What's that? pancakes Mac and cheese What? What's a what? Plutter beans Oh butter beans. I see. Oh lime of beans. All right Butter beans it's good What about? What about grilled cheese? Anyone's first grilled cheese No, yeah one in the back. I grew up a vegetarian and Anyone else here grew up vegetarian? I'm the only one it's pretty common back in the 1980s where I was growing up vegetarian You were pretty much the only one and 90% of the time if you went to a restaurant or you went to the school cafeteria you ended up with one of these the grilled cheese sandwich and So I had a lot of grilled cheese Because you were also kind to come to my session today instead of all the other fantastic sessions You could have gone to I'm gonna share with you My mother's secret grilled cheese recipe, okay? You ready? Okay. It starts with a seed You take that seed you dig a little hole in the ground you put the seed in the hole You cover the hole with dirt you water it you let the sun come down up comes a shoot of grass You cut the grass you take the bottom of the grass you grind it to a fine powder you mix that powder with water and some yeast and There's different kinds of yeast you could use like a sourdough starter or You know maybe we'll come back to that it's getting a little confusing isn't it? Yeah, okay. We'll go to the next the next thing. Okay. We'll come back to it though Okay, so for this part When a mommy cow and a pop of bull really love each other a lot They go to the back of the passenger How can I say this? This is a lot better when I rehearsed Okay, well, we'll just skip that part two for now, but you take some bread you take some cheese You slather it in butter which you get the store. I don't know how to make butter and You end up with one of these beautiful glorious grilled cheese sandwich So how many people learn to make grilled cheese the way I described it just now Nobody of course you did and With butter beans, but I think so often this is how we think about training people we say okay We're gonna teach them HTML then CSS then theming then module development. We have a list of skills and we take them through that list of skills And then we say okay now you're trained right like you sign up for a training course. What are the titles? it's like Programming 101, you know how to be a great php developer how to be a great JavaScript developer There's a lot of this focus on skills Excuse me when I'm gonna advocate to you today Is that for effective training? We don't focus on the skills. We focus on the experience of learning We focus on creating an environment where people are enthused where they're passionate where they care Where they learn the things that they want to learn and this is what I call the metacognitive autodidact grilled cheese hypothesis Which states that you learn to make grilled cheese by making grilled cheese not by Coupling cattle You learn to make grilled cheese because it's yummy and you learn to make French toast by accident Okay Now you're probably wondering I've wasted three minutes of your time And who is this guy and what right does he have to talk to me about grilled cheese sandwiches? My name is Jacob Singh I've been an engineer been a Drupal contributor for five years and part of the community for six been working with aquia for four years and Been full-time as a trainer for about a year and I have a terrible sore throat. So please Just bear with me for a second if I run out of voice. I also trained in Modern dance for a couple years. So you never know And I only want 25 minutes your time. I know this is slated for an hour I think that's a really how many people think that's a good amount of time to hear someone talk for Nobody it's ridiculous. Okay. I only want 25 minutes of your time. Please just stay with me for those 25 minutes I'm gonna talk for 15 minutes About three values about teaching which I learned the hard way and you might apply in your own lives and what you do We're gonna watch a silly video for five minutes, which I made badly and I'm gonna spend another five minutes maybe talking about hacks you can use with your learners Or we'll just do questions or I'll dance Okay So What's the what do you think is the biggest problem we have in in Drupal right now? Is it selling Drupal? Not really shortage of talent, right? We can sell it. We can market it the biggest sites in the world are running Drupal our companies are all doing well We're just signing contracts and hoping that we hire someone fast enough to deliver them a lot of times and so That's the best problem, right? Could you ask for a better problem than that? That's a good place to start At aquea we uniquely have this problem because we have to grow really fast to make our business plan work And so we started this program called aquea you Anyone here heard of aquea you? feel you Start this up. We took eight web developers who wanted to you know get into this field and We did give them six weeks of training on Drupal customer service and an aquea So they may become aquea employees. They are full-time employees, but they may get a permanent Position that was the program just ended two weeks ago. This is the group I'm this goofy guy on the right Cave and Volcker Berg my partner in crime right there in the middle. He was also working in the program And this is the gang and you know, I'm not an expert. So I didn't I didn't go to school for instructional design I'm not any Cognitive scientist. I'm just a loudmouth engineer who ended up becoming a trainer because I talked too much I know about code and But but I have to say this is the best project of my career I felt it was very successful and I learned a ton and I want to share a little bit that I that I learned with you And I would boil those down into three core principles We have to decide between a plan and a passion we choose passion We have to decide between theory and practice We choose practice And we have to decide between something that's simple and smooth and something that's authentic and real We choose the authentic Okay, and I'm gonna start with you start with the the first one seems like a good place to start Which is a passion is more important than planning Okay So to get started for this program we had approximately four weeks and so I Started working on a syllabus. How many of you got syllabuses in high school? College you get a lot of them they look something like this, but don't read it That's why I put that there. I just is there to demonstrate how long it was okay There's a lot of bullet points. There's learning outcomes for everything. There's lesson plans. I had a lot of structure And the structure is good a plan is good. You should have a plan But you know the plan is not going to work for the entirety of their program plans are only good for the moment they're created and So by week four The group came and said you know what you've been pushing us really hard We've learned a bunch of stuff, but there's a lot of some things we don't know we want to review So can we throw out the plan and do something else instead and I said sure Said all right put together your ideas and let's vote on them so the group voted And the number one vote getter was git and learning more about git who here knows what git is Do I have to describe it? Wow, okay. I don't all right. It's good So For those of you the couple of you didn't raise your hands git is a tool for managing changes to code and tracking them So without a lesson plan we came in and it was like Tuesday afternoon It was around Miller time and everyone was kind of tired and I said okay Why don't you guys just go up and draw for me on the board how you think it works They want to know what more like the internals of it And so the group got up on the whiteboard and everyone got a little section And they came up with these drawings Photography is not good If I'll get works Erica came up with this like you know There's hands coming out of her laptop going up to the server gods in the cloud and bring down the code Chico had the whole thing set up nicely and puppet master Dries up at the top sort of Controlling the flow information Mark at Larry the git guy with his get-or-done cap Pushing and pulling stuff in the magic cloud. We keep talking about The best one was Andrew Andrew came to us from Boston College or Boston University University, yeah, he did his master's in upper atmospheric physics His last project was he built a rail gun then he decided he wanted to come work for aquia and make websites anyway But better physicists. He's a better draw. He's a better drawer He's a better artist than a physicist and this is his he came up with the git parrot Now you may not think that a parrot has anything to do with a version control system And you would be absolutely right But it turned out to be the most effective class I've ever given and so what we did is instead of tracking changes to code We track changes to the parrot So somebody made an attractive made attractive and compelling lashes for the parrot and that was one commit into our log Then someone added a fantastic hat to augment beauty Then we had a mohawk to foster gender ambiguity and that came from somebody else on the other side of the room So because there was a hat and a mohawk what happened a Conflict absolutely, but you can see in red on the finished parrot at the top And it was a total riot everyone's having a great time And it was amazing in an hour and a half this group of people Completely understood the system, which is so dry and so hard to explain to people You know and I didn't do any of it I didn't plan it they just came up with it then we practiced it on the laptops and sort of reinforced it And the point I want to make here is that when you prioritize passion over a plan You do the best thing you can do as an instructor Which is that you encourage your students to take responsibility for their own learning you encourage rebellion You encourage them to throw you out your goal as an instructor should be to deprecate yourself by the end of the class You should just be you know sitting there cheerleading and getting drunk in the corner. They should be doing all the work It's great for everyone So encourage revolution in your classrooms second Practice is more important than theory Let me take a break actually Let me say that better. I Would say that if you have to choose between theory and practice practice should win Okay, now a little audience participation, please If you think the figure on the right best represents a software developer Raise your right hand. You think the figure on the left best represents a software developer raise your left hand If you disagree with the person next to you give him a high five Because your hands will be touching Come on the more votes Okay. All right. I see if I see if you left these out there. Those of you left these can keep your hands up put your left hand up Okay, you're all wrong Software development is a craft You know, you don't get good at Becoming a carpenter by learning how nails are made and you don't get good at becoming a programmer by talking about how code is made Fair I don't care. I'm the one with the mic. I get to say it, but it's it's no It's a hyperbole. It's too far off there But I do feel like in general if I have to decide between talking about it and doing it We should prioritize doing it so The first week of aquee you we said, okay Here's your name tags. Let me apply your barcode onto the back of your neck. Welcome to aquea and Here's a list of eight random people in the company you've never met Go interview them ask them some questions make a Drupal site With all those interviews on it and then make a staff directory where you can filter by department. You have three days Good luck. Here's a list of resources that might help you. Here's some people you can ask questions go for it and Everyone jaws dropped. I mean this group we had people who learned about Drupal when they applied for the job They'd never really used Drupal before We had someone who was a professional dancer before they got into this who'd never written code before But what happened was amazing They met all kinds of people they made relationships that went forward and they struggled they really really struggled They had to ask a lot of questions. They had to research on their own. They had to figure things out They had to help each other They stayed late and on Friday they demonstrate they demonstrated their sites and they were beautiful all of them were amazing And all of them were complete week two We had given them about four hours on command line training So is there anyone here who just learned to use the command line recently? Couple people it's kind of a daunting task. Isn't it was it hard? Well, they didn't they don't they're shy they don't want to admit they just learned okay But if a lot of people it's hard if they've never typed into a terminal. It's pretty difficult thing to do We gave them like a half day on that we gave him a half day on git and the basics of git and then we said, okay Now take that Drupal garden site you made with all those interviews on it And upload it to aqueous hosting aqueous cloud and bring it up there Go, that's it. Here are the docs and Ignore the men in lab coats behind the glass over there because we had all our usability watching them to see how they would fail And it was a little painful in retrospect. That was a little too much of a leap but the end result was that You know as much as they struggled and nobody got that done nobody succeeded that week Struggle makes it stick. These people are going to be supporting our customers. And so we want two things, right? We want to know if They are able to That they're able to see what our customers go through on a day-to-day basis We want them to feel that same pain as our customers And we also want to test the system on them because they're free guinea pigs that we have in the office anyway When you practice You struggle and when you struggle you reinforce the pathways in your brain Which let you know that that learning is valuable and unless you give people an opportunity to struggle They won't build those pathways and they won't recall it when they need to so as I said practice over practice over theory There is no learn just do You don't learn things you just do them learning happens by accident doing happens on purpose focus on doing Now this one's a little bit of a funny one Anyone here plays sports or played sports like professionally or semi-professionally like in college or something. We're really trained. What did you play? volleyball in college Yeah, and so Where did you practice you must have practiced all the time, right? Where where do you practice? The gymnasium, right? Is anyone like played music professionally or played music professionally and how did you practice? What do you play and how did you practice? Yeah So he's had a regular time, but what instrument do you play? The organ and did you like read sheet music before going to bed? Probably not so much Yeah, you mostly practice with your instrument, right? Yeah, and When you do volleyball you mostly practice in gymnasium. You don't necessarily like practice in your house, right? That could get messy So a lot of times with training and as trainers we want things to go smoothly Because if things go badly we feel like it reflects badly on us, right? Our students are confused and they're frustrated and We feel that reflects badly on us. We want things to be smooth. We want our lesson plans to be smooth As a presenter. I want this presentation to be smooth But learning is is most effective when it's authentic when you do it in the environment in which you'll have to practice that learning later and so one of the things that we did is In we started out like aquia is very team-centric, right? We talked about like rock star developers who here has ever heard the term rock star developer who of you Do you like that term? I don't Who wants to work with rock stars to egotistical strung-out maniacs, right? We want to train studio musicians Aqua is full of teams. We all work together and so Aqua you should be too So in the second week, we split the group of eight into two teams two teams of four and We I asked them to name the teams I was like you want a team a and team B team red team blue and they came up with the lasers and the phasas Now I guess that's from this movie dodgeball. Is that true? Are they just putting me on because I never seen the movie. It's like a team laser and a team phasas Because I said it for like four weeks feeling like a jackass, and I don't know if it's if it's real or not But anyway, we went with it and they were team laser and team phasas and from that point on Everyone everything was done in teams. Every deliverable was in teams and teams have a lot of benefits Because everyone shares their skills, right? If you have someone who's good at graphic design And someone is good at you know configuring varnish. You come together someone is good at presenting and project management They all can come together and succeed as a team and help each other and learn from each other It also motivates people But more importantly, that's how they're gonna work once they leave our program and they go in the real world So why shouldn't we train them that way? Everything they did was just like they would do once they had a normal job. They use Jira. Don't look at this slide. I Should have put up a red thing. There's a lot of text, but we use our project management tools Everything we did, you know to track projects In the beginning of every week. We did a sprint They would plan what they're gonna work on they'd commit to it and on Friday They'd be a demonstration they demo it retrospective the whole scrum process for those of you who are aware of that actual process you know and They worked on Some projects which were sort of made up for them, but the majority of their work were just things that need to be done at Aquia I went out and I found people who needed work done that was appropriate and we put it together There's a lot of problems with that The problem is that real work is really really messy Yeah, it's one thing to say. Okay. Why don't you add this feature to aquia calm where people can request a new article in the knowledge base But it's another thing when you have to then find the developer who has the specs for that when you have to get the The code working on your local laptop when you have to clear it with like for marketing people who all disagree around the text and all of that Right. It's messy. It's a pain. It's work and it can be frustrating But I want them to experience what they're going to be facing and it's not just about learning how to build that form It's about learning how to work with everybody else to get the job done And that's part of holistically teaching it so they can see all the angles when they get into the situation We don't want one-dimensional when one-dimensional characters coming out of this And it's not just me. There's a there's a Distinguished-looking boring white guy with a beer on the next slide to tell you the same thing This is Robert E. Bjork professor of cognitive psychology the UCLA It's great quote Information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory learning is much more powerful agree It's a train train where you're going to use it learning context train authentically and Those are the three points I want to make and Now I'm going to show you my silly video One thing we do at aquia in the engineering team. Is anyone here from the engineering team? They get any no my compatriots didn't show up We use scrum who here uses scrum in the organization or agile every call it a lot of people how many people do demos as Part of that process not for customers necessarily, but internally even yeah, how many of you do retrospectives a few of you good cool and so we did that every week with aquia you and The demos are great because it really You know we invited everyone the company It wasn't just me and Kay like you know Dries would walk in or Tom would walk in like check out what you guys are doing so they they knew that so the pressure was on and They presented in the final week we had about 50 people from the company packed the training room for their final demo and They nailed it. It was they made me look so damn good They were just amazing and and they they kill with it themselves. I said hey I want you all to present about who you are and Where you were before this program where you are now? For a couple minutes and they came up with a format Basically showing a slide who they were enough before and after and talking and we recorded it The video quality is really terrible and my editing is even worse But that being said I think some of them are kind of cute. So I wanted to show it to you Okay Here we go. I my train was basically akin to this. It was the original bridge of the Starship Enterprise I could make stuff that looked nice and it seemed like it was really cool But when you get down it's basically cardboard and Christmas lights now I can create sites that are a little more like this where I of course kept a card so starting out I was doing projects with Amateuric science and physics and I actually made a real gun here. I think I was a little overwhelmed Kind of like being a turtle breathing out a little shell. Use your imagination. It's a turtle I would say that I'm probably still a little dismayed, but I'm at least a little more colorful My name is Erica Lecheski. I'm the dancer in the group Actually a BFA in dance and teaching of all things and a master's degree in nonprofit arts administration So I'm the one who's never programmed. I've never heard of command line I've certainly never used to get like my triple experience was this starter home I have gotten into command line and I have used to get and I've been working in depth cloud and pulling down sandbox sites And working with the team Hi, everyone. I'm Madhura Madhverkar and and prior to coming to Acvia I I was I mostly had programming experience with C-plus this and such I've learned how to patch I Can understand module development? So I think I've come a long distance from where I was Mark Sakurada about nine months ago. That was myself. I'm from Afghanistan So I've got a little bit of a colored different background So as a reservist that I was a independent developer So the will code for food to literally apply prominent superheroes yet, but we're we're dressed up and ready to take on the fight Nathaniel Hoeg Studied environmental studies in college and picked up web development as a hobby. So the hawk Sort of represents where I was I I was the expert But I was also very much the lone person. I would say that I'm much more like a bat That's our communal They have a lot more agility for my bat metaphor here to be able to hunt bugs So my name is Sam I Graduated with a degree in computer science from Brown University. This is just a lake. There's not really much to say about it But yeah, this is the good part so So this is a hydra I like hydra's so I like to think of Drupal as a hydra You can if you want to just walk up and start hacking away, but it's a really bad idea Lucky, maybe you'll slice off a head, but it's going to regrow two more in the case of a hydra You might want to bring sort of a flaming sword So when you chop off the head it will quadrize it and not through another one For a Drupal if you fix a bug Send it up to Drupal.org as a patch and then Then that bug is going to stay dead So I graduated from MassLol I'm sorry Tim the video just got cut so sorry for Tim But I had to leave him on anyway video the video ended Anyway, that'd be fun that you know the people that we're working with They're good friends and they're they're really a fantastic group And I hope you get to know them more as they show up with Drupal Collins in the future And maybe they're at this lectern or podium or whatever it is in the coming years So that's it. I'm going to close. I promised you 25 minutes. I just hit it on the dime Yeah, and last thing you remember Encourage revolution in your in your teams get them to take responsibility for their own learning Make it fun make them want to learn and just give them the environment to thrive Just give them the environment to thrive and all the support you need and this is really the best way I feel like that we can train the next generation of Drupalists It's not through specific strategies around what skills we teach them and it's it's not through Necessarily training programs. Although those can help and I'm a trainer and I do offer training programs But it's really about in terms of organization Give them that hacker passion find them a fight a way to create the environment So they have that passion and let them learn let them learn by accident so We do have some more stuff Kay was going to come up and we're going to take questions if you guys want And we have some more slides if you want to do that too But leaving up to you to let your passion dictate over the plan. So for now. Thank you very much So just introduce myself really quickly I'm Kay van valkenburg and I was really excited to work with one of the most talented software engineers that I think Well Drupal draws an incredible Crowd of talented software engineers, but it was great to work with Jacob on this project So a big hand for Jacob really nice presentation In any case I've spent the majority of my career helping people acquire software skills and this was an exciting arena in which to Combine a lot of things that are very specific to Drupal and a lot of opportunities for the future of Drupal and the way that teams Work together in a larger group excited to hear your questions. We'll fill them as best we can but Yeah, go ahead any questions none at all Yeah Sure good questions He's asking did we do we give them any orientation to Drupal what content types are and stuff like that before we just dropped him in So yeah, it's a presentation. So I embellished a little bit We did send out some resources ahead of time to people but there were some people who are very fresh The group was was broad one guy Andrew learned about Drupal during his interview or like when he applied for the job Another guy Nathaniel he already had a core patch committed. So we had everything in between So we decided some resources ahead of time and we gave them a reading list of things to look at But explicitly we didn't do a class on basic stuff because we had a few people who were pretty advanced and we thought that would be better Self-taught Yeah privilege of the classroom wherever it sat What if you had to do this some of this training and your organization was distributed across the country? How would you adjust it? You know people people keep telling us we have to do training by webinar Yeah, is it feasible and how would you adjust to it? That's a really tough question Well, I think it's absolutely feasible. I think you really have to start with is this actually on It is on okay, and I won't mess with it It's feasible, but I think you have to start with what you what your expectations are for the pace and the outcome so a big component of what we focused on was actually Building a sense of team and I think that there's a special there's a special hurdle that comes with webinars and Distance and I guess if you prioritize That team building highly enough you'd probably want to choose to gather them in one place but I think that there's an awful lot that can be accomplished without people needing to be Co-located and teams work very very well in a number of companies including aquia that are distributed so I think it has to do with aligning where you're going to put your focus and What you want is an outcome, and I think that would be an important one to consider One other point to follow up on that. That's absolutely absolutely right. The team part is difficult Someone has been remote almost my entire career. That's a really huge challenge I would like to talk to anyone who wants to talk to me about that because it's something that we're thinking about aquia myself specifically Around how do we really scale Drupal training big time? We use a lot of our partners resources like Drupalize me. It was awesome for this group. Thank you and You know other resources out there that people watched but developing more of that and how we do distributed teams And how we give people a way to learn themselves So if you're if you're interested in that topic, please come find me because I want to hear what you have to say about it So, yeah, thanks. Hi. Thanks for a wonderful session. I'm Tony bow from Prometheus in Indianapolis And I hadn't really thought about kind of addressing the the You know finding people from this angle of well, just train them yourselves I was quite astounded to see the wide array of Backgrounds of people that you've hired so were we yeah, my question is based on your experience and research Should we be filtering in any way You know backgrounds of people or or can anyone basically be sort of molded into a Drupal developer He's trying to start a fight We actually this is an interesting discussion that we've had quite a bit and we'll probably continue to grapple with it for a while And you know, I if you don't mind I'll throw out an initial answer and again I would say it depends on what your objectives are and sorry if this ends up becoming the Answer that I start out with to every question But I would say, you know, we talked a fair amount about what we would have done if the entire group were had a more homogeneous Starting point, you know, if everybody had some experience with PHP everybody had a solid grasp of CSS You know JavaScript weren't You know something you couldn't quite, you know get a handle on as a concept. So you know We found that there were a number of at least Objectives that were very valuable that could come out of this particular program I'm sure it's true in a number of different Projects if you're trying to build just an engineering team that everybody's going to work on a very specific set of engineering tools I would say Practically impossible. You'd need some very very fast learners in the people had less experience Just to illustrate it if you think about trying to teach some one simple relatively topic CSS to people in let's say Six weeks if that's all you had to do you I'm sure can imagine some of the challenges It's not a very complex thing But experience counts for an awful lot when it comes to things like CSS in part because of the way browsers behave with it So that's at least part of it. Yeah, yeah, just briefly I mean, I think that it was a huge challenge having the diverse group that we had in terms of their skill level In terms of their backgrounds or where they came from and who they are That was a much more diverse group than like than aquia or our community as a whole and that was great That was a huge strength An absolutely huge strength. I couldn't overstate it enough These people really worked well together as a team in jail. So I think you can start anywhere But I think doing it again I would probably look for a slightly more homogeneous group But primarily we hired for attitude. We didn't really hire for experience as much and I think that was a wise move And we'll continue to do that Hey, my name is Ben DiMaggio. I run a small Drupal shop in Boston and We're taking a similar philosophy toward getting new people as to what you guys are doing Which is we're finding people who seem to have a good culture fit with us and who seem generally bright But who may not have a lot of skills to begin with But I'm discovering that one of the downsides of that is that you'll begin to train someone and in ways Similarly informal to what you describe But you'll find that they're not picking it up fast enough to be effective We don't really have the luxury of giving people a six-week training course to begin with. Yeah, so I wonder what you'd recommend for dealing with Slow learners. This is the problem. This is the problem with every presentation. I give as an aquean. They're like, that's cool But you guys are rich. What am I gonna do? I Wouldn't try to make there's always that question I don't know to be honest Yeah What we do is a long-form investment in the individual which not every company can afford to do and I worked in small Consulting shops before and I know what that's like You know, I would say that that's like I put together a series of hacks here, which I can talk about I'll share with you a couple really quick. I'll share it with one and then Kay will share with you another one I think I think you do address this One of the ones pretty cool is this idea we came up with called mechanical bulls So basically a customer being a real bull and this being a mechanical bull So it's a fake customer and we made up this concede Heather James Some of you know an island she came up with this great idea Which is the you win site. It's like a ward site for YouTube videos You submit your favorite videos and people come and vote on them and make awards out of them We made this site bare bones and we wrote up about 30 requirements for it written like user stories like we had personas we did the whole thing like a mock client and We said like easy medium and hard for site building an easy medium hard for programming for some coding And we every and the for the past last few weeks the teams would pick a few as part of their work assignment They also did authentic projects, right? This is not an authentic project But it's the best we could do to create an authentic project that was like seem real And so this is really effective and allowed people this like dojo if you will to come into and hit the punching bag I'm like, okay. Let me try another one. Let me try another one. Let me try another one And that was really effective. And so if you have to train people in a rush It actually is a good way if you can't trust them on client sites to give them this thing develop a really good punching bag and Let them go nuts on it. Basically keep evaluating their progress on that It becomes a more valuable resource over time as people start as people more people more people work with it You have more and more stories of how different things are done and you know that can that can be effective This is actually for the last week the assignment was Okay, each team take the site make up your own requirements and make it awesome and demo it This is one of the teams come up with there's a lot of really cool features here They wrote custom modules and there's lots of great stuff with it So that was actually a really useful exercise that everyone liked a lot And we're gonna probably incorporate that into a lot of aqueous training programs as well like our paid corporate training stuff The other one is this Mentorship Which is actually pretty close to another thing that we talked a fair amount about and that is pair programming in the mentorship in Aquia you was very set up to be very casual and it ended up in some cases with Technical challenges that people were facing that were hard to address as a group it ended up providing incredible Creativity and resources for answering some of these questions one of the well actually so Let me let me just back up one step casual mentorship in the sense that we Didn't try any fancy chemistry or mechanical experiments to actually pair people well People on the aqueous side walked into the room and on the mentorship the group of people who had volunteered as mentors Walked into a room and people basically said On the mentor side, you know what their various interests were and on the aqueous side where they came from what their background was And it was like okay pair up and they walked out of the room with pairs more or less You know it was it was very very quick and casual like that a lot of things came out of that just because of the personalities of the people who Volunteered as mentors and then in addition to those mentors Fortunately, we had a number of people Well, there's a culture to start out with of people who are ready to help each other out who rely on helping each other out and And this kind of casual arrangement with mentors became incredibly powerful And there's a great story and take just a second to tell it because it's worth telling of people wanting to understand DNS and One of the people who was not officially a mentor, but did a lot of mentoring in the group came up with an analogy between the receptionist at aquea and All of the people that you might want to locate at aquea or the Resources that you might need at aquea and she became the DNS server It was it was great You couldn't have asked for a more creative way to solve some of these problems some of these questions that were coming up some of The struggles that people were having in a more formal form of mentorship. There's also a great tool that's certainly practiced by some companies a matter of course and that's pair programming where basically two developers sit side by side and and take on stories together and Jacob you advocated for that quite a bit as well Probably since it's not unique to this discussion. It's worth looking at pair programming if you're not familiar with it Hopefully that's that's somewhat helpful. The other people check out is my planet digital They have a really cool program Which I haven't talked to them about yet, but looks really great called fellowships and their consulting firm a large one But they have like they have a way of doing it where they have low impact We hired full-time employees. They were like seven hours a week and they had different things I don't know how it's going or whatever But it's an interesting looking model and they have a sexy looking website. So check it out. Thanks a lot. Yeah Hi, my name is Dave look. I'm a partner in a small firm in Chicago as well. So Similar question. I think you guys actually touched on quite a bit of this But we're we're working on consulting on a pretty large project and we have a diverse group So Lullabot actually partners so we've got everybody from Sid and Andrew Barry to people that have never touched Drupal before on our project Fun, so how do you suggest and we're a year in on a probably a two to three year project? So how do you suggest getting those people that are at the low end up at least to the middle? I mean, I don't I don't really have a good answer that I'll be honest. I don't really know. I think that as I said My my personal philosophy is that getting the environment, right? It's harder and more important than getting the the list of these are things you have to teach, right? I mean, are they working with people more experienced? They have mentors Do they have free time to hack on stuff where they're not expected to deliver project deliverables where they can maybe stretch themselves a little bit on a project I think that I Think there's limited success you can have if you're like on a project deliverable timeline as opposed to a Building a team building a company building a culture timeline I really feel like the latter is the only place where you can really invest in people Otherwise you can just do quick shot trainings like knowledge stuff move for two days talk to you what this module and had a code for it done Yeah, I think that's really all you can hope for in that environment. Thank you. Not that I'm an expert or anything anyway I'm Clayton Dilks with Raytheon web solutions in Pasadena, California And I think you kind of answered my question with that last one I've got a team that we're transferring from cold fusion into Drupal primarily Drupal But we still have a ton of cold fusion work sure and as we all know it Drupal resources are hard to come by so essentially what what I'm struggling with is Training people we don't have time to put together a two-week intensive course Yeah, and and looking over a further long term a couple of hours a week at most Do you have any advice on strategies for that? I'd love to throw out a piece of advice Don't underestimate the importance of best practices experienced coders will often Find a way to get done what they need to do It will appear fine. It will appear to behave fine and one of the hardest Those things start getting baked into what teams do and it's extremely hard to move forward with that what you end up with is One of the most pernicious forks You could Settle yourself with so I would say be realistic The timeline you're suggesting is Incredibly challenging and I think the pain that will come from rushing that Outweighs the pain of investing in it Really does and and fortunately we see it over and over again Yeah, I would say that one thing you can do if you don't have the budget or whatever like we do training programs at aquia and We'll come in and do private trainings with with groups of anywhere from, you know, three to two fifty or whatever And those can be really effective we can do like one-day things or week-long things But I feel like a good way to do that is to do like a two or three day hit of training because honestly classroom training is like You can't do more than that before people start to burn out in a week and repeat that every quarter Every few weeks or every month or whatever So a little bit of classroom a lot of practice a little bit of classroom a lot of practice But it's what making an investment keeping going back to that I feel like it's important and it's worth also adding you can stage a lot of the move You can do it with appropriate projects You can get some advice if you're not familiar, you know with with how to go about it first But a fairly brief engagement about best practices and architecture on a specific project You think might be a good fit is a really good way to bring people along Yeah All right, I'm Brian Braun, and I was just wondering you said that this was your first iteration through the training program You wanted you wanted to join the program didn't you I saw you on Twitter Anyways, I wanted to know what have you learned from this iteration that you would change Differently and do it differently the second time around or the third time around actually it's funny What I did at the end I didn't do it actually so as I said we do a retrospective every week for those You don't know what a retrospective is basically what went well. What didn't go well. What do you want to change discuss it as a group? And we came up with the last retrospective was this was great. We all totally loved it. Everyone was really happy and Everything should have happened in week one It would be a lot easier if I knew what I learned in week six at week one And we said threw it back and said okay well one of them actually so why don't we why don't we design our own syllabus? So I was like that's great. So each team then spent the weekend a couple of days building their own syllabus they took my syllabus and The reality of what we actually did which was deviating from the main syllabus and they built their own how it should have been Surprisingly it was pretty similar to the one that we what we actually did so I don't know if that means anything But that was a fun exercise It's also worth mentioning that at the end of week one Everybody basically agreed that it was physically not advisable to try to do another week one like that Yeah, so to have the scope of week one grow is kind of funny. I think we you know It's hard to say. I think we stayed on the edge of dysphoria. Yeah, I don't like 25 cent words I just used one. Sorry dysphoria means, you know, if you don't know it means like when it doesn't feel good It's good to stay on the edge of when it doesn't feel good because That's where the learning really happens. That's where like I said the struggle makes it stick so we really We set up an environment where people pushed themselves very hard We didn't push them very hard But we said a on Monday commit to what you're gonna get done by Friday and invariably they'd over commit and they'd be stressed out and Freaking out and up all night and like treating their bodies like crap and their families hated them And they're like I didn't ask you to do all that but you know So that was cool if you want to work really hard. They wanted to prove something. I think we could have controlled that a little better I think we went a little too far some weeks or people are just totally burnt out and frustrated and At the end it all ended well But I would manage that a little more tightly as I said, I'd have a slightly more homogeneous group I think we're a little too all over the map What else I would prepare external speakers better It was great because we had all these people at awkward like Angie came and talked trees came and talked a lot of people You probably don't know but our fantastic Developers and other other experts in other fields came and talked to the group which was hugely valuable But we didn't always prepare them well enough I think or we didn't make sure they're prepared well enough. So I think I would Ensure that there's a little more planning when external people come in. These are specific things, but you asked so Hi, my name is Hans Rimen Schneider. I fully agree. You said Hans Hans When someone is engaged, you cannot not learn and when somebody is disengaged It's extremely difficult or impossible to learn and what? Like the idea of you know, basically taking a bunch of people and throwing them in the pool and having them work together But in a like an ecosystem like Drupal, it's not anything goes You know, we have coding standards and those need to be followed for the community to function well So new people are not going to be aware of them. So What do you address on the front end of this is something you should watch out for and avoid and what do you? Circle around to when a mistake is made and say well, we would rather do it this way Got a chance to thank you got a chance to plug another hack here, which are the portfolios You know, we made a requirement to document your work So everyone that those original Drupal garden sites they made with the company directories Those became their blogs their portfolio sites where they documented everything that they worked on and that was awesome There was a requirement to blog every week and they have some awesome blog posts and people made Screencasts and all kinds of stuff that they wrote about and they're still doing it and they're all at this site u.aquia.com and But to answer your question specifically You were asking about well, how do you how do you let people just go run free? You know, and it's not exactly like that because they demonstrate their work every week We'd look at it every week We discuss it with their retrospectives and they would reflect on it and in the process of reflection a lot of times These things would surface a lot of times the troubles would surface. We did a lot of reflection They were on their blogs we did retrospectives and we we heard of people are coming from their concerns We looked at their code. They had mentors who looked at it with them So it's not about I think the thing is you have eight people and they're all over the experience spectrum Right, so some people need to hear about coding standards probably like three of them who can program but don't know Drupal Three of them are not programmers or barely programmers So talking about coding standards just gonna bore them to tears They don't even know what the hell you're talking about and a couple other ones already have core patches They don't need to hear it at all and that's just one example But pretty much any topic you pick you're gonna find that spread and so it was really more about give them projects to work on Give them a supportive team supportive mentorship and those specific things they need to learn They'll have to take responsibility for finding and learning those things themselves to a certain extent We'll help them will clue them in but it's not about I can take the class and say you all need to know X So you can do why? Because they all have different X's and they all have different Y's unfortunately So the project-based approach was really the only way to make that successful I think it's also worth adding to that that the community does a pretty good job of giving some broad guidelines And so if if you can if you can impart one Guiding principle it would probably be Assume that you haven't done this first you the person who's learning Go and find how a trusted resources done it refer to documentation on Drupal dot org and Then some of the phrases that they'll naturally come across and certainly you can reinforce as well like Configuration before coding Don't kill kittens, you know that type of thing those are some pretty good guidelines So there's a saying you know set someone free and then just have them go wild It's not entirely wild if you can give them those kind of leads on the flip side There's a risk in those types of leads and that is that the there is a variety of quality even if you only get the most Well Constructed tutorials, then there's also a variety of Focuses and scopes so to preview some of the things that people are going to as resources And give them some guidance on how well that fits with what your team does or what your project does those those all help control that sense of Setting setting people loose and seeing what they come up with So I think that we think we have to close because we're out of time, but thank you all for coming. I enjoyed it If you if you want to find me Twitter is good name is Jacob saying just like my real name Business cards are here if you want to get in touch with me that way Probably lose them, but what the hell over there and you can find me my username is own sourcing own sourcing sorry own sourcing