 Hello. Thank you for coming to my session. This will be Adoptable Goats Near Me, what I googled the year I became a developer. Before we get really into it, let me actually start the presentation. My name is Kimana Bots. I work at a place called Nerdery in Chicago. Nerdery is a digital business consultancy working at the leading edge of strategy, design and technology to help clients evolve and thrive. Our motto and our mission is to relentlessly invent a world that works better for all. It's a really great place to work and they sent me here so they're pretty great. So back to the whole I'm Kimana thing. How many of you have googled yourselves? Great. So we have basically everyone in the room. Awesome. I googled myself frequently. And back in 2016 where our story begins, this is more or less what you would find if you googled Kimana. Before I started working for companies that had SEO or even knew what search engine optimization was, if you googled me you would find things like an IMDB page where I was a production assistant for my friend short film or a bandcamp page that has an album that I wrote to fund my first trip as a professional overseas. And that trip eventually led to where I found myself in April of 2016 which was signing a contract, a two-year contract to help develop an English music curriculum for an international school in Beijing. So you might be wondering how did this person with an IMDB page and a bandcamp and also a face cream named after them and that's actually named after me, how did that person end up being in front of me here at Drupalcon Amsterdam which is a Drupal conference and not either of those things. Well that is what I'm here to talk to you about today. So children's books about terminal illness. These are all things that I googled. Well friends, in May of 2016 a month after I had signed my contract to go teach in Beijing my mother informed me that she had stage 4 ovarian cancer and after a hard fought battle she passed away in December of that year at which point I took custody of my then nine-year-old sister. So you might be wondering why would you lure me here at 10.45 in the morning to like just make me sad immediately. You promised me goats and now you're just talking about terminal illness. What's wrong with you? You're mean. Couple of reasons. First, chronologically this is what happened. Second, if you start from like children's books about terminal illness you can really only go up from there so hoping things get better from there. But really this is to kind of preempt the thesis of this whole talk which is that there is something to learn from every situation with an asterisk. Learning occurs constantly and it's not what I'm saying is not like to distill your experiences into like a nice little silver lining kind of oh you know what sad thing happened but the good news is that now it's like not not that it's like not oh other side of the rainbow is shiny and stay positive it's not not to do that don't not not just not necessarily to like distill all of your experiences into these like clippy little swirly font over like sunrise kind of situations it's not to do that. What it is to what what I what I'm saying is that you can get information from all of your experiences. When I look at learning I think of what do I know now that I didn't know before and so what the situation with my mom and my sister had taught me is that like I I now know my thresholds for grief right I know how to handle certain kinds of situations I know more about myself as a person and how I handle stress I know more about how to communicate with people and things like that and so that's that's kind of what I'm pushing here it's to just assess kind of where you were and where you are and figure out what knowledge has has been gained in that timeline so yeah when I talk about learning throughout this I will basically be talking about the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience study or by being taught so just knowledge not necessarily like hallmark card situations so over the months following my mom's passing I learned a lot sometimes I learned through experience sometimes I had to Google it like is it okay to let a child eat oatmeal for dinner but then after things got kind of settled down I started looking into going back to work so at the time I was working at a junior college and I was teaching I was teaching at a like a pre-university kind of situation and I needed something long-term but what I knew is that I needed something where I didn't want to be responsible for like the well-being of other children I knew that like I was my hands were full enough with my sister and I didn't want to be responsible for that kind of thing and I'd always loved coding and programming like as a hobby I had made a couple of small games here and there and so I started to think about what other things I could do because teaching in the United States teachers are not treated well and that's really unfortunate and as as unfortunate as that is I couldn't like as noble as a profession is I didn't want to subject myself to that mistreatment there's already too much kind of stuff going on my life so I decided to look into coding bootcamps and I found one which is now defunct called Dev Bootcamp and there it was a 18-week intensive course that taught coding and like the basics of programming and things like that and basically like you you sit in a room and you code for several weeks and then at the end of it you hopefully have some basic knowledge that you can go and get a job so this is this is what I kind of like learned there is that like failure provides context discomfort provides catalyst you don't need to be perfect at everything all the time 100% the first time you do it there is intense value in failing and being like uncomfortable now when I say discomfort and when I'm talking about uncomfortable I don't mean like safety I mean so on on the slides is a diagram where you have on the y axis you have motivation and accountability on the x-axis you have psychological safety now when I say discomfort I don't mean like I don't feel safe in this situation I don't I don't mean that like I'm stressed out or or things like that what where learning takes place is at the kind of sweet spot where you feel psychologically safe but when you feel motivated and you're held accountable for your learning that is what I mean by this discomfort so like there are stakes to your learning but you feel safe so if you for example don't feel like psychologically safe but you're also not motivated you might be apathetic to what you're trying to learn if you are maybe not psychologically safe but have like serious motivation or like accountability like you're there's a lot of pressure on you to learn the thing or like to succeed you might be in the anxiety zone right where where you're anxious all the time and that there's it's maybe not the most healthy place to be if you are not super motivated but also psychologically safe you're in your comfort zone it's nice comfortable place to be but that's not where that that important friction happens so ideally you will be in a position where you're psychologically safe but also like highly motivated and held accountable for your learning and the things that you're trying to produce so failure going back to failure it deepens our knowledge of what we're trying to work with when you fail your expertise isn't brittle you need to know how to handle things when they break because things break more often than not right if I only write like perfect clean code and never encounter an error message when I'm working in a production environment and I get an error message like I will never have encountered that but if I break a bunch of stuff all the time while I'm learning and I get to see all of these cool error messages and have to figure out how to solve them then the depth of my knowledge is like that much more robust so as we like as I continued in this program I ended up doing lots of Ruby projects lots of like HTML JavaScript but then my final project was an Angular and I am not like a front-end kind of person I don't like Angular is not my jam I'm not a huge angular person so there's a lot of like intense stuff that had to happen when trying to acquire more knowledge or like a new skill or learn something new context is important that is both providing context like about the actual subject matter but also like where you are doing your learning your attention will improve if you are learning in different environments if for example one day you're doing the same like you're doing some exercises and you're like in your office and then maybe the next day you go work at a coffee shop you're kind of like reinforcing the knowledge by generalizing it in your brain so that you can access that stuff later also testing yourself kind of goes back to the failure thing where like the quickest way to get that feedback that like failure feedback is to like get a thing wrong you're more likely to remember something if you do it incorrectly so maybe don't rely on like templates or don't run to the docs immediately when you when you're like redoing a thing right like maybe you try to recall it from memory so that you're understanding okay well these are the components that need to be in this thing and that's not to say like don't ever use those things it's just when you're learning them it's it's more helpful to like have to do the thing before relying on the tools that make quality of life a little bit easier also teach someone I had the luxury of having a nine-year-old person that asked me what I did all day at the dinner cable and I would have to explain to this nine-year-old person code things and I will tell you right now if you can explain what you're doing to a child you have a very good understanding of what you're doing if you can because it because you have to like not use any jargon you can't use any technical things like being able to explain things and it's in their simplest terms means it is a great way to like to to figure out like how deeply you understand the fundamentals of what you're working with so if you don't have a child of your own perhaps borrow a nephew or a niece and be like hey guess what I learned about Jason API today this is something like that I know but teaching someone else will help you I need a burrito so as we kind of near the end of our the end of our story it was the final week of my coding bootcamp and I was very hungry because I was coding for like 18 day 18 hour days and it was just like really awful and I'm like I need a burrito angulars treating me terribly so I went and got a burrito and there I met a person and he heard me being like real enthusiastic and like oh I'm so excited about my final project and all this stuff and he was like hey do you do code things and I'm like I do do code things I love it and it's the best thing ever and he's like cool do you want a job and I'm like yes I would love a job and that's basically how I got my first job just being really enthusiastic about coding like as enthusiastic about coding as I was about mediocre burritos so just keep that in mind if you're ever in a job search but enthusiasm begets enthusiasm bothering people is real fun and it can be productive did you know that like there are people that make things and people that make things like the things that they make and if you want to learn about a thing the person that made the thing is probably like real anxious to like talk to a person about this cool thing that they made so when you when you want to bother someone you're not really bothering it's strategic bothering you you find someone that like is really enthusiastic about talking about the things that you want to listen to about so um that's that's kind of how I got a lot of my like initial knowledge is that I was just like oh my gosh my great API is real cool how do I do this thing and then I just found people that like were really into my great API and I'm like I learned a bunch about migrating I'm like well you know what how about how about just object-oriented programming in general and then like people that are just like real cool maybe maybe maybe no one wants to listen to them talk about like source plugins for two hours maybe that's not not what they want to do but I would love to talk to someone about source plugins for two hours so that's like a good good match if you find someone who is enthusiastic about talking about the things that you want to learn about and it usually usually like ends up being really really good especially in a community like Drupal also mentoring works both ways at the end of my bootcamp I immediately signed up to be a mentor at a different bootcamp because the way I look at it is that like yeah I didn't know a whole lot about coding and programming and things like that but also I knew more than I did when I first started and if I knew more than I did when I first started there are people that are where I was when I first started you can help at any point in your journey whatever whatever you're learning like you can help someone because there's always going to be someone that doesn't know as much as you and for for that matter like someone learning a thing you were just so close to having learned the thing so that you might know like you have it fresh in your heads an instructor might not have like oh well last Tuesday had to solve this problem that an instructor may not have like encountered the same problems that like someone that is like freshly learned the thing has like encountered very recently so like wherever you are in your learning journey you can help and if you don't have like the answers the research it together and it's great like you you can help at whatever point just being a person like has gone through that experience and that kind of stuff is like really important so whatever stage you're at mentoring is great and people always want mentors and it's very beneficial both for you and for the person that you're mentoring it also holds you accountable to like know what you're talking about because you don't want to tell someone the wrong information and then just showing up part of the reason why I'm here today is because I just like I just put my face in people's area and I'm like this and then people are like you're there I've seen that face before let's do a thing and I'm like yeah sure I'll put my face in the thing and it's cool like just being where you are and just showing up and saying yes and being open to opportunities is like super valuable because you get to meet so many cool people that are doing such cool stuff and also like you get to help out and then you get to learn more stuff and it's just this ever-growing cycle and I came across this Angela Davis quote very recently that kind of boils down to like as you rise you should lift people up so like as you continue to learn and as you kind of like gain this like mountain of knowledge you can also just lift people look people up and bring people with you and like that way we can make a look of much stronger community so how do you want to talk that's the end of my talk but before I go contribution opportunities there is mentored contribution first time interviewers workshop and general contribution you can find it in your programs or an app and also I would love feedback so if you go to the session on the Drupal Khan Amsterdam website you can leave me feedback there and then also leave feedback for Drupal Khan Amsterdam and that's a top the end