Saving fish by writing code! Applications developer in fisheries, specializing in webapps and moving 'enterprise-y' legacy systems to modern agile systems - Email or tweet me if you want to talk!
Establishing a culture of learning has been a particular goal of mine. It took a while to get sharing up and running. I think a couple things helped us out.
My wife points out that I'm a big talker - I do go on. In particular, I go on in our weekly team meeting about what I've been doing, technologies I've explored, techniques I'm using, etc. We have a couple other talkers, so the weekly team meeting started getting long and creeping beyond updates for the team and boss.
We have a policy of allowing developers significant latitude in terms of technology choices. Provided our users are being served and deadlines are being hit, developers can use new and different tools and techniques.
We started a large conversion effort that involves the whole team and a new tech stack.
We have a team culture of listening and respecting all our devs and allowing people to be wrong or make mistakes without shame or recriminations
We had a leadership shakeup and I was acting supervisor for a while, so I used my dictatorial powers to reduce the length of our weekly team meeting and shift tech presentations to our new tech workshop meeting.
I believe the combination of these points helped get people committed. In particular, we were having de facto tech talks to the point that we were derailing our weekly team meeting and we started a big shared effort with new technologies.
None of us want to sit in a single meeting all day, and all of us want to hear about ways to work with our new shared effort, so we have a bit of a carrot and a stick to get people into a tech talk meeting. I was able to goose it along with my supervisory powers, as well.
I created a timeslot for a meeting and encouraged anyone who learned something new or did something interesting to talk about it for a few minutes at the new meeting. I advertised the new meeting at our weekly team meetings and recruited team members to speak fairly aggressively. Early on, I did a lot of talking to model sharing and demonstrate that 10 minutes on something small, like a novel IDE configuration was fine.
It's worth mentioning that this is not the first effort we've made at having tech talks. I've seen several other efforts start and stall. I think our unsuccessful efforts tried to do too much. Here are some things that didn't work for us:
Quarterly workshops - these are just not frequent enough for us to schedule. We'd do one, then forget about it for a year
Multi-team/department workshops - it was just too hard to coordinate our schedules and we'd keep postponing until it died
Formal, high quality presentations - our developers are sufficiently busy that creating a good powerpoint with resources is a high barrier. Few ever did this
Expecting devs to organically share - no champion pushing presentations means no presentations
A lot of this is based off a talk by Joseph Matsy that I attended. I wrote up my takeaways on building a culture of learning - right now I think my organization is in the "buy in starts" phase, but I'm hoping to push some of the 3rd phase features as things move along.
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Establishing a culture of learning has been a particular goal of mine. It took a while to get sharing up and running. I think a couple things helped us out.
My wife points out that I'm a big talker - I do go on. In particular, I go on in our weekly team meeting about what I've been doing, technologies I've explored, techniques I'm using, etc. We have a couple other talkers, so the weekly team meeting started getting long and creeping beyond updates for the team and boss.
We have a policy of allowing developers significant latitude in terms of technology choices. Provided our users are being served and deadlines are being hit, developers can use new and different tools and techniques.
We started a large conversion effort that involves the whole team and a new tech stack.
We have a team culture of listening and respecting all our devs and allowing people to be wrong or make mistakes without shame or recriminations
We had a leadership shakeup and I was acting supervisor for a while, so I used my dictatorial powers to reduce the length of our weekly team meeting and shift tech presentations to our new tech workshop meeting.
I believe the combination of these points helped get people committed. In particular, we were having de facto tech talks to the point that we were derailing our weekly team meeting and we started a big shared effort with new technologies.
None of us want to sit in a single meeting all day, and all of us want to hear about ways to work with our new shared effort, so we have a bit of a carrot and a stick to get people into a tech talk meeting. I was able to goose it along with my supervisory powers, as well.
I created a timeslot for a meeting and encouraged anyone who learned something new or did something interesting to talk about it for a few minutes at the new meeting. I advertised the new meeting at our weekly team meetings and recruited team members to speak fairly aggressively. Early on, I did a lot of talking to model sharing and demonstrate that 10 minutes on something small, like a novel IDE configuration was fine.
It's worth mentioning that this is not the first effort we've made at having tech talks. I've seen several other efforts start and stall. I think our unsuccessful efforts tried to do too much. Here are some things that didn't work for us:
A lot of this is based off a talk by Joseph Matsy that I attended. I wrote up my takeaways on building a culture of learning - right now I think my organization is in the "buy in starts" phase, but I'm hoping to push some of the 3rd phase features as things move along.