What makes effective developer education? Joe Eames joins me to explore how to create more effective learning content that ultimately helps your product get adopted faster by developers.

Talking Points

• What is “make it stick” and how does it translate to developer education?
• What makes effective learning?
• Effective learning myths
• What you see people getting wrong when teaching developers (and what to do instead)
• How to measure learning effectiveness (what are the metrics we might care about)
• How your teaching methods have changed over time

<Blockquotes>

Lightly edited for context

“The quicker someone gets to where they are feeling comfortable with what you’ve built and are effective at it and can implement it, the more likely they are to turn into a paying customer or stay a paying customer and not convert over to something else.” – Joe

“Compared to your competitors, if you are faster and easier to learn, you are almost for-sure more likely going to have a significant lead and edge in gaining and retaining customers.” – Joe

“A lot of the things that we think have to do with effective learning are actually wrong.” - Joe

“Effective learning should feel effortful and should feel hard. If you go to the gym and after your session you walk out and you’re relaxed, if you’re not tired at all – that’s a really good indication you did not do anything useful at the gym.” - Joe

“Life doesn’t involve us doing the same thing over and over again, and certainly programming doesn’t.” - Joe

“Follow-along coding is one of my biggest beefs. Programming is not typing – programming happens in your mind as you try and figure out what constructs, what code to actually craft and create. Whether you're typing with a typing language or drag and drop with a language like Scratch – the actual programming happens in your head and typing is just an expression of it.” – Joe

“When you’re typing along with somebody who’s coding you’re making zero decisions yourself as to what code to write. You are simply mimicking and parroting the code that they write and so what you’re actually getting is typing practice.” – Joe

“As educators the more you can do to get people to do hands-on the better. You can even just tell them how useless it is to watch this video and that they need to be putting this into practice themselves.” – Joe

“You don’t actually learn better using your ‘preferred’ learning style, the most important thing is to get the learning in the most effective learning style based on what you are being taught.” – Joe

“Ask a friend to go through the course, essentially a beta tester, and have them give you some real, true feedback.” – Joe

“Ultimately YOU [the learner] are the most responsible person for your own education.” - Joe

“We watch other people do something and we think that somehow it teaches us something and it really doesn’t. It’s the most ineffective way to learn anything.” - Joe

“Being familiar with a topic isn’t the same thing as gaining mastery over it.” – Joe

“Popularity is certainly no measurement of the quality of your education.” – Joe

Links

• Make it Stick (Amazon affiliate link) / Goodreads (non-affiliate)
• Joe on Puralsight / Medium / Twitter
• Angular 11 Fundamentals on Pluralsight – Requires a subscription
• Fundamentals of Angular on Thinkster – Free but aged (like a fine whiskey)
• StackBlitz and GitPod – Spin up interactive sandboxes
• New React docs with Challenges – You have to fix the issues to beat the challenge