DEV Community: Grace Taylor

Blazor Sticker Giveaway – Try the new Blazor Guide in Visual Studio

Grace Taylor — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:32:09 +0000

We want you to try our new Blazor Guide inside Visual Studio and we are giving away Blazor stickers for those who give it a try. Read on to learn about how to give it a try and for a chance to receive a sticker.

Above: The Blazor sticker that you can win, by trying the new Visual Studio Guide!

Blazor helps developers build rich interactive web UI using C#. To help developers learn Blazor, we’ve created an integrated Guide within Visual Studio so that everything you need to create your first app is available in the same space.

The learning experience walks you through editing and building a sample Counter app in Visual Studio. Since this is the first launch of a new learning experience, we’re looking for feedback to help us iterate on the functionality and content of the Guide!

Above: Screenshot of a step in the Guide

Try the Guide

We are giving away stickers to 100 randomly selected people who complete the Guide! Here is how to give it a try:

Install the Visual Studio Preview experience here. (You must install the Visual Studio 2022 Preview from this link to get the new Guide.)
Create a new Blazor server app using the instructions provided in the Guide (select “Build your first Blazor app”). Above: Screenshot of where to start the Guide
Finish the new Guide to learn how to build your first app.
At the end change insert a new <h1> under the <h1>Counter</h1> tag with your name, such as <h1>Grace Taylor</h1>.
Fill out this form to complete your entry.
If you have Twitter, share a photo of you completing the guide and mention @dotnet, @aspnet, and include the #VSguide tag.

To be eligible to be selected:

You must complete the steps above and fill out the entry form.
Giveaway is open to residents of the USA.
Giveaway is open to those who are 18 years of age or older.
Please submit by July 25th, 2022 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Sticker recipients will be notified by e-mail provided in the survey form no later than August 5th. View the full Terms and Conditions here.

Teaching CS: Guiding students to grow at their own pace

Grace Taylor — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 20:37:42 +0000

We all have a shortage of time and we’re seeing that many CS educators are overloaded with too many students in each class, especially in introductory college and university courses. According to one Stanford report, this has been the case for the last two tech bubbles.

At a time when we’re all embracing asynchrony and educators are trying to scale efforts beyond personal capacity, we’re looking for ways to give students the support system they need. Students are struggling to be successful.

We’ve created a VS Code extension called CodeTour that guides people through any codebase, step-by-step, to learn at their own pace and see each piece in context.

Instead of explaining isolated concepts to students, we believe that guiding the student through the codebase will help them understand how the code works. For example, we are able to point out where the data exchange happens and what an example of abstraction would be in the code, without changing the code itself.

We believe that seeing the code in context is a faster and more natural way to grasp new concepts.

The codebase uses a guided tour style to walk the developer through using explanations. The teacher can create a tour to share an explanation of any piece of the codebase, called a tour. Each tour contains tour steps. The steps can be edited right within VS Code.

The tour steps can contain markdown or run shell commands to make setup easier.

Teachers can export tours to apply to other codebases.

Students have a choice of different tours in the codebase so that they can understand how each concept fits.

We would like to hear from you: what do you think of CodeTour? If you are an educator, is this something that you think would help teach CS?

What is the fastest way to onboard to a new codebase?

Grace Taylor — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 22:46:15 +0000

What has worked well to help you to quickly become productive, and what has been frustrating?

Rethinking the onboarding experience

Grace Taylor — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:47:53 +0000

Onboarding can be tough. It's hard to know when to ask questions or who to ask, when everyone is so busy. There's a lot of tribal knowledge and scattered docs so a lot of teams rely on knowledge transfer sessions.

A 1000-person survey conducted by BambooHR suggests that 90% of employees decide whether to leave or stay at the company, within their first six months. Respondents have said that “receiving clear guidelines to what my responsibilities were” and “more effective training” would have influenced their decision.

We created CodeTour to improve the experience of onboarding and sharing knowledge within a team. It's an evolving knowledgebase walking through different parts of the codebase.

Here are a few ways that CodeTour addresses onboarding challenges:

Important information never leaves the codebase.

Any dev can record important information inside the codebase.

Mentors won’t repeat the same brain dump sessions to each new dev who joins the team. Instead, new devs will get the fundamentals from walking through a code tour at their own pace.

New devs will come to mentors with specific, scoped questions.

They will already have background knowledge about the codebase, from the code tours.

There will be fewer questions that feel “stupid.”

Learn what you need to know, at your own pace.

When we’re told to “explore the codebase,” we don’t know where to start. Code tours give a solid starting point and guide you step-by-step throughout the codebase.

Here is the CodeTour prototype.

We envision that tours will move beyond onboarding, into code reviews or other areas. I have spoken with hundreds of devs to research onboarding and knowledge sharing to understand the different challenges.

What are your thoughts? What are your challenges to onboarding new devs or onboarding into a codebase?

How does dyslexia make it hard to be a developer?

Grace Taylor — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 23:48:12 +0000

I wanted to start a conversation about neurodiversity in tech.

One of my good friends found out she had dyslexia after struggling to learn code, for years. Our tools are designed for most people to read or write code the same way.

How does dyslexia affect learning, writing, or reading code?

Reimagining virtual team collaboration

Grace Taylor — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 23:14:13 +0000

Do you ever wish that collaborating with your team when working remotely, would feel more natural? A 4,300-person survey from Digital Ocean shows that 33% of developers primarily work remotely, and 28% split their time between remote and office work.

Remote work is on the rise, and one of the toughest parts to a developer’s remote work journey is when they are onboarding to a codebase. It’s tough to know how each of the pieces in the codebase work, why the code was written this way, and who to ask for help.

Our team created a prototype called Spaces, a VS Code extension, to address issues for onboarding and collaboration, especially for remote teams.

Here are some of the ways the prototype addresses some of these concerns to create a virtual team room that feels natural:

1. Talk about code, where the code is.

That way, context is never lost.

We wanted to cut distraction and make sure that a developer only gets notifications from people they are only working directly with, day-to-day. Focused discussion means less spam.

2. Get help without hassle.

We heard from developers that context-switching is the time-killer. So we wanted to reduce this by showing that getting help or making a note on a section of code is as easy as highlighting and right-clicking.

In Spaces, there's no need to paste to Slack/Teams, choose a channel, format code, or reference a line number, when you ask questions about code.

Note: We are looking at building this feature into the prototype and this is still in progress.

3. Sharing context is simple and fast.

We envision that discussing code on another branch or giving help can be as simple as viewing another person’s environment without disrupting your own. No checking out branches.

Note: We are looking at building this feature into the prototype and this is still in progress.

The implications of asynchronous collaboration are endless. A developer can provide or receive help whenever they have a window of time, without breaking their workflow.

Here is the current Spaces prototype. Feel free to check it out!

I have spoken to hundreds of developer teams to understand how they are collaborating in today's development landscape. I would be curious to know, what do you think? What are your challenges to creating a virtual team room?