 So RubyConf, I must ask you a question, is the title of my talk? You know, the problem is I planned this part of the talk where I would say that I was just saying sentences because my voice usually shakes at the beginning of these, but fuck it, my voice is not shaking. So, okay, boom! And we've already gotten the first curse word out of the way. My body is a big betrayer, but I guess it's just not going to betray me this time, which is kind of a betrayal, right, asshole? Okay, so we're going to start strong now. Years ago I failed my PhD exams twice. How's that for starting strong? And then I really, but I really wanted that piece of paper. I worked years to get the piece of paper. So I bought a PhD from a diploma mill from a sort of a semi-accredited university. And so I do have a PhD. It's on my bookshelf at home because I'm not really proud of it. I don't even post on LinkedIn where I put all of my really important certificates. And that, by the way, in the background is Tara the Goat, which it's not a coincidence she was named after me and she's awesome. But I clearly take LinkedIn very seriously. But back in the PhD years, my first mentor, Jim Schiff, who really ramped up his efforts to get me passing the exams after I failed them horribly, he helped shape my understanding about how I learn, how I process information, and how I communicate what I learn. And he said to me, this is the first new goat. He said to me, Tara, you like to walk around the barn before going inside. And that really sums up how I learn and how I approach different things. And you're all kind of discovering this during the talk as well. We're sort of walking around the barn. But that description has been essential to my understanding of how I process what I'm trying to learn or can't seem to learn. And one of the reasons I'm giving this talk is because I struggle with grasping concepts more than the average person. And this is a talk about learning at all levels. We're always learning. But at least in terms of how we mentor or more informally, often peer-to-peer how we mentor or are mentored and how we learn about ourselves is what I'm going for. My problem with learning was really brought home to me again during coding boot camp. We paired with new people every single day. And we organized our way around the room such that we started with like the slow, people who wanted to go slow were at one end of the room and the people I called the golden children were over at the other end of the room. I was like hanging out by the windows over there as far as I could get. It turns out, of course, that some of my perceptions about what people knew or didn't know was wrong. But I did, I got a clear impression from all of the different people I was pairing with that how I was learning was very different. I was making progress, but it was very different. And I want to emphasize that while there was progress, that knowledge of difference can do a real number on a person. And I don't want to make this a talk about things that you can't translate into your own experiences. So you're just going to have to trust me when I say that the struggle was real and it was beyond the norm. So I'm just going to stop for a moment because I'm going to tell a lot of stories so I figure I may as well make some actual points that you should learn how you learn. It's essential to learn how you learn and it's helpful if you are helping someone else to learn to help them figure that out. But ideally, you'll learn how you learn so that you can communicate what you need. I wish I could go back to those PhD exams. I feel like I have a better chance of advocating for myself and explaining to my professors what I would need in some different test taking strategies in order to succeed. But I can't. So I want you to learn how you learn so that you can communicate that with others. And then learn how you don't learn. Fail a whole bunch of times. I am very good at this. As you know, you go into code and you fail a whole lot trying to solve different things. It's the same thing with learning how you learn and what failed for you one time might succeed for you the next. And so you really do have to try a variety of things in order to sort that out. And I mentioned this specifically in this talk because I think when you work with different people and you're trying to mentor folks even informally, you really need to learn to look for a variety of different ways that they are learning as well and kind of modify what you're doing when you can. And then even though some of your colleagues might attend a talk on being a good mentor, you are really the person vested with the vested interest in learning. And so I mean that I'm sure that is quite obvious, but it's really it doesn't matter if somebody comes and gives you the thing that tells you how you learn. It's my responsibility now to take that and communicate that with others and figure out how to make up for my weaknesses in learning. And I want to make a distinction between what I experience with my slow learning and imposter syndrome, which I also have because I fit somewhere in that circle. A key point from my PhD exam failure example is that I'm a real misfit when it comes to learning and communicating what I know. And I realize that everyone kind of thinks they're a special snowflake and I am, but we all are. And that's why we all think that, but I want to make sure that my own failure is really clear. I'm not sure why I want this so badly, but I do. I want to make sure that you understand my failure, that it was beyond the norm, because prior to me failing my PhD exams, only one other person in the previous decade had failed the exams. And he admitted to taking a nap during the timed exams. And then filed a grievance and was allowed to write his dissertation and continue. And I'm not bitter in the slightest. I'm bitter, but I mean this was big. And I have a large monthly payment that reminds me on the regular that I don't learn like other people learn and how I learn can be expensive. And my story gets worse. Spoiler alert, the reason I'm sharing this is that it isn't this dire for most folks. And I hope that's encouraging. Even if things are this dire in similar or different ways, one can still succeed. And I say that from the stage of the national conference for my primary programming language while gainfully employed. So that's my evidence of you can still succeed. That's all I got. I really like you people. OK, also I want to make sure that we have a common understanding of what I mean by the concept of being a rubber duck. By the way, my friend Robin drew this. She also designed the Goat User Story stickers. And it's so much better when it's not in VGA. You're just going to have to trust me that she's really talented. So if you need a graphic designer. The idea of a rubber duck, I believe it originally comes from the book, The Pragmatic Programmer, where Programmer is debugging by explaining the code line by line to a literal rubber duck. And that meaning has come to mean different things as things do. But it usually involves something inanimate or, say, someone who doesn't provide technical knowledge to the solution. Many ways it's used now, you might start an email or a Slack message to somebody and you solve it simply through writing it out to the person. So in that ways, they're kind of inanimate. OK, back to It Gets Worse. As I was saying, I have a new job recently and I am trying to learn a ton faster and not be found out as a learning misfit. I wrap up my day and then I start reading code books. I'm taking online courses. I'm watching YouTube videos about coding. I'm trying to grok all the things at once. I'm also learning a new programming language, so that's part of it. But my body is a betrayer. I don't know if this is true for everyone, but my body is. And it's like the more I try to keep being a learning misfit a secret, the more my food issues flare up and I gain weight. And I mean a lot of weight. I'm really good at that. It's as if by hiding my misfitness, my body makes me confront not fitting in a physical way. And it really, it sucks. So now I must ask you the most obvious question. Why the fuck am I sharing expensive failures, my learning issues that are outside the norm, and food issues of all things at a tech conference? And I am, in a small part, I am using you. If my own beliefs about psychology and how it's connected to physiology are correct, then by confessing my true fears of being found out as a learning misfit by putting those out there, I'm hoping that it might solve the problem. That because I'm actually very good at losing weight when I'm not struggling with these things, and you're basically all being my rubber ducks right now. I realize you're not inanimate, but just as being part of an audience and not necessarily a dialogue with me, you are my confessor, rubber ducks. I'm Jewish, by the way, which is why it's a rabbinic duck and not a priest duck. So you are all being my rubber ducks right now. And the theory for me is that once this is out there, once I am explaining the problem to you, that the solution will be okay. Like I have confessed this thing that is really difficult for me, and that hopefully will free me after I have a proline, I want one proline, and then I wanna be freed from the sugar, just one. That's all I want. Okay, another reason for sharing my personal shit with you is that we are all vulnerable meat sacks. We're all vulnerable meat sacks, and we might have come to this room or this talk for different reasons, but a key reason that I'm up here is so that you have knowledge, rather than just information, but knowledge you know from me how important smoothing the way for somebody else can be, somebody else who's dealing with outside the norm struggles or even inside the norm struggles, because again, we are all vulnerable meat sacks. So beyond the career related practical reasons that might be a good reason for being a good mentor, I'm hoping to appeal to you on that level. You might not put on 50 pounds every time you're under a lot of stress and trying to hide your learning mis-fitness because you might not have any, but we all need folks to support our efforts and to support the efforts of other folks, and I'm hoping that you will do this because I am why this stuff matters. You are why this stuff matters, and we are to borrow the name of one of my favorite podcasts, We Are Greater Than Coat. We Are Why This Shit Matters, and within your own boundaries, I want to be up here suggesting that you try to facilitate other people learning and growing in their careers, and I'm not saying you have to go in and fix people's food issues, but if you can ease the way in your career with your colleagues and that kind of thing, that can help them deal with the other shit that they've got going on. So I started with this to give you examples other than your own, especially if you don't have any, about how easing the code building process can ease up other areas. So now you may be asking, why would anybody hire a slow learning Tara? And that is an excellent question, but first of all, I mean, hopefully I'm a nice person and people like being right. I don't know how smart you are. That's it, thank you. Oh my God, I love a ringer. Thank you, I'll get you your $20 later. So as you can see, I'm a freaking delight. But really, I mean, people who experience the world differently see possibilities instead of obstacles, and that is a great trait to have when you're dealing with code. My whole life in terms of the food issues and the learning thing, my whole life has been obstacles and I'm so used to failure, I just keep going. I go back around the barn. If it wasn't ready to go in the first time, I'm just gonna go back around the barn again. I am a good person to have around. I'm gonna dig in there, I'm gonna build your feature, debug your problem, it'll be fine. Okay, I'm getting to the practical stuff now. We have circled the barn and Sonia, my first engineering mentor, she was my official engineering mentor. She paid attention to how I learned and when we paired one on one, she would ask me specific questions about the code that we were doing and the context we were doing it and she would say things like, do you understand what object.method is doing here? That was not their names, they had better names. But do you understand what object.method is doing here? Do you know why we changed that thing to do this thing? And the specific in-context check-ins helped me know that she cared about my progress and this is where the more traditional imposter syndrome comes in is that I don't even know to this day whether she purposely asked me things that I would know to instill confidence in me or did I just know more than I thought I knew? It's probably a bit of both but we just never know these things. But I got the opportunity to be Sonia's rubbered up because I really brought very little technical knowledge to the table fresh out of boot camp. But she asked questions of me that were really questions she was asking for herself, not these object.method questions but asking what she should do next. Should she be concerned about this thing or that thing? And that taught me what questions a senior engineer would be asking about their code and it was a mentoring process and even though I was in that silent, mostly silent role of kind of a rubber duck for her, I learned a whole heck of a lot. And so I think one of the things I want to give as a takeaway is that first of all, people can learn from folks more seasoned or less seasoned than themselves. So it can be any pairing scenario but honestly there is an opportunity to teach and to learn in those pairing sessions and I hope folks take advantage of that quite a bit especially if you're helping to level somebody up a bit. I want to talk about a different sort of a mentor than I had. I had a variety of colleagues who were all very good at helping me answer some of the questions that I had but I had questions that I, I call of them stupid questions and you can talk to me later about whether I should ever say that again but I call them stupid questions and they were the questions, like there were the questions that I knew like a junior engineer and newbie would ask and I asked those of across the team, you know, Jeremy you're here, I asked you all kinds of questions but what you may or may not know is that I saved my stupid questions for Daryl. Daryl's there on the right. He taught me how to rebase first of all which was very exciting. He walked me through my first rebases and he celebrated with me when I did one successfully by myself. He was not there when I nearly passed out when I did something really horrible with the rebase once but and I was literally pale and clammy and texting Carrie Miller from the floor of my apartment. I sucked in some code and something happened but Daryl was there for most of my stupid questions and here's what happened is he established trust with me with this rebase instruction and then I asked him one of my stupid questions that I knew would reveal that I should not have been hired and I asked him that and I asked him not to tell anyone that I asked that question and he did not tell anyone. So from then on I decided this is perfect. I'm gonna limit my exposure and I'm gonna ask Daryl all of my stupid questions and only one person will know they never should have hired me and that is a fantastic technique. What I want to suggest because most of you maybe already have that first job is that you establish trust with some of your less seasoned partners or heck even you're just same level of colleagues establish trust with them and develop a secret pact if you have to but it's important in order to have those special moments and those people who mean so much to you and level up your career it's important to first establish trust in order to get to that place. So here's some easy career boon mentoring and rubber ducking can have is that once I felt more confident that I had reached at least the within the norm spectrum of junior developers I confessed the pact to our boss Daryl and I had the same boss and I told him Daryl was not my mentor but he mentored me and Daryl got promoted. I don't think it was because I told but it couldn't have hurt. Daryl was very talented and so I'm sure that is why he got promoted but it couldn't hurt that he even though he was not an official mentor he mentored the junior developer on the team and I made sure that his boss knew it was career building for me and I wanted to make sure it was career building for him. So the takeaway there, I hope probably obviously is certainly you wanna show gratitude to those folks who do take the time to care about your learning and keep your secrets that you're asking stupid questions but also build trust as a potential secret pack provider. It's very important. This happened recently and I don't know if you can tell but like the VGA it's washed out but can I name you in my RubyConf talk and I get to name him as you can see. Brian Hall replied you can name me as long as it's either good or you're calling me an asshole. And this is in Slack if you do not recognize it's lay out there but Brian was also a different kind of a mentor. Daryl had been promoted and moved on to a different team so I really picked the right person to tell all my secrets to because he left the team. No one was left on the team who knew I should never have been hired so that was fantastic. I had a solid footing in coding and I didn't pair much with Brian when he worked at Living Social with me. We did some SQL, some active record and we did some jQuery together but we didn't have a whole lot because soon enough the dark days of the Living Social layoffs came and we went our separate ways but fortunately we continued maintaining Slack with a lot of the Living Social employees and so Brian and I kept in touch and when I started at my new job I still had coding questions and of course I didn't want them to know I was stupid and that they should not well I wasn't stupid. I never thought I was stupid. I just thought I'm a slow learner and I did think they should have hired me and I'm glad that they did but I still didn't want them to know how little I knew in those early days when I was trying to learn all the things and I was stressed out because I don't learn very well. Anyway, I would contact Brian via Slack and without sharing proprietary information of course we would discuss the things that I was working on in code and soon enough by the way he would help me and that was great but soon enough we ended up having to reach out because I was asking fewer questions and that became a milestone that I think was important for me to recognize and I would suggest that if you find yourself in a similar position where somebody is asking you questions and they start to dwindle that that's a great thing to point out to them like I don't know if you've noticed but you reach out to me less you're still welcome to do so but that's probably a cool thing that you're reaching out less you're probably feeling more confident and I was and then what happened with Brian is he just turned into a real asshole. No, that's not true it's just because he told me. Yeah, no he didn't but he stopped being able to answer my questions because I mean I'm sure he would have been able to if he'd been working on the code with me but I'd reached a level where I was now working on projects that were far enough along and asking more technical questions that I finally just sort of I could no longer just ask him a question and without us being in the same code base he'd be able to help me and that too was an important milestone and it was great he recognized it and it helped me to really acknowledge that as well that's a pretty exciting thing to realize especially when you are a vulnerable meat sack who has learning difficulties it was pretty exciting to realize that so as I've worked with developers newer than me I've gotten to try out these questions which I think is kind of fun and I literally, I pinged Slackbot to do this slide but this is what I sent to folks and you can tell I was up late. Yeah. That was actually early but I send this message and it's a pretty good icebreaker I mean it's hard not to smile when you get a mustache and an inquiry it's hard to turn down somebody who sends this and I know that because people that I have done that with have sent it back to me, I've gotten it back and it just makes me laugh and I just know this is a person I have a good rapport with and we're gonna do some mentoring no I never think that part but that's what's happening that is what is happening and okay we've only got three more slides we're coming down to it I promise so I've tried to suggest that caring about the vulnerable meat sacks that surround you might be a motivator for asking good questions and being a trustworthy mentor but also becoming a better version of yourself is a good reason a motivator to be a good mentor or a good rubber duck everyone can learn from good questions including the person asking them and mentoring can be as easy as answering stupid questions and keeping them secret I don't know if I clarified that but don't tell anybody I did eventually by the way tell Darrell that I had told our boss so that he could bring that up and it's one-on-ones in performance evaluations but if none of that human stuff motivates you I do want you to remember that Darrell did get a promotion so that's good okay one more circle around the barn back in the PhD days oh my god you cannot even see that fucking owl trust me this is a really great slide okay back in the PhD days I took a few feminist theory classes and that shit bored me to tears I still don't really know what was happening in those classes but the significance was totally lost on me I didn't know why it was important it made no sense to me this is maybe why I failed the PhD exam no the actually women's studies was not one of my areas of concentration so it was fine but I never could have imagined that joining the tech industry would teach me so much about feminist theory and lest you think that I am going somewhere else with this it's this community especially the Ruby community from what I can tell from the various conferences I've attended and people that I've talked to but it's this community that's taught me to see commonalities alongside difference to learn better communication in the presence of difference and to appreciate difference and a series of mentors both formal and informal have helped me level up to a place where I get to learn more about my betrayer body and then reveal it to a large crowd of folks in the setting and most of all that being able to appreciate difference is so important to me and you have all inspired me to share what I've gotten from you so that I can return it all back to you and so I'm sharing this because I want you all to keep this shit up and in a more conscious ways even than you have already and expand on it and grow because it has been so life changing for me I'm eternally grateful for it and you give me hope that we can all treat one another in a way that honors our differences rather than hiding them and I'm extremely grateful for that. Okay, I've shared some stories I've offered some specific questions to ask of others and of yourselves and I hope that you give your best for yourselves and for those around you and I am again deeply thankful that you have all been my rubber ducks at least for a half hour or so so thank you very much I have no idea if I have time for questions and I don't really have to dash but I do have stickers there if anybody is interested in those and I do have a question if nobody else has a question by the way I'm totally blind up here so you'll have to say something if you have a question You have about 10 minutes Oh, I have 10 minutes Okay, I'm gonna start because I've already got the mic Yay, I do have a question because I thought of this far too late and some of my slides don't translate well for visually impaired folks but I went to a slide share I think and I couldn't add captions or anything to my slides and if anybody has a tool that they know where I can post my slides but add captions to them so that people who can't see my awesome pictures like none of you could see the owl then that would be great if you might tweet that at me my, oh my gosh, you can't even see my Twitter account Excellent, media remedial is my Twitter handle and thank you Jennifer so that was my question Are there any others? That is a really good question especially I am considering I think most people have heard about mansplaining before and nobody should go there I think one of the best things to do is to put the, how do I put this? There's a balance of power and there is a power structure that comes into play with the more seasoned engineer and the not a seasoned engineer and that could be just in say this one particular scenario and I think a great thing is to put the action and the power for that action in the other person so even just asking a question I'm a big fan of questions just let, you know, I know a bit about EmberJS components would you like to talk about that or some question in that way and I'm more than happy to hear from other folks in the audience who have ideas but for me asking a question and asking whether they want that assistance is a great place to start certainly do not start with well actually I don't care who's involved in the situation don't start that way I was gonna try to recap it but now you've lost me and I noticed you flailing but I was gonna recap it a bit for the video presentation but we were asked how do you know when to step in and one of the suggestions from the back of the room that I can't see was that you ask what the person is doing or how they're doing and they can explain what they're working on in a very neutral way and then they will as you mentioned get to the part maybe they'll just get to the part where they're flailing about right you don't actually have to say that and that the shout out right before that and what you've said is great I'm kind of gonna recap it a little bit which is just that on the one hand if you're asking what they're working on and how they're doing it then you might just end up being a rubber duck they may during the course of explaining it figure out what's going wrong for themselves or as Betsy points out where they are struggling might be due to how they're understanding what's going on and because they're explaining to you in the way that they understand things you might get a clue on what they actually might need some assistance on so that's excellent thank you I really like having Sam in a meeting so the suggestion which I'm repeating for the sake of audio is that if you have an opportunity you see someone you think might be struggling in a particular way and you are willing to do it ask the question you think that they want to ask but might be a little nervous about asking and that also I think builds that trust as well even if they don't know for sure that you did that on their half they know you're a person who has similar questions and that itself can build a bond so I think that's great how much time do I have left anybody know there's like this huge okay I'm done yay I lived woo