LunchConf

A few weeks ago I read about LunchConf via https://twitter.com/pwnela and through her tweets managed to track back to a sensational presentation (http://kwugirl.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/continuing-education-at-work-talk.html) on continuing education given by kwugirl(https://twitter.com/kwugirl).

This is a topic I'm a bit in love with. I joined my current company as a very junior engineer and I couldn't believe my luck when my work started having Design Patterns classes every other week. These were patterns I had been reading about but now I got to talk to peers about them and talk to people who had used them. I was blown away and from that day have really been a fan of making your place of work a place of learning too.

I'm hoping to use this post to talk a little about how we try and have this peer learning in place to supplement both formal training and individual guided training via Pluralsight.

After a long running series of talks attempted to bridge the geographical and timezone divide between the offices (Boston and Belfast) faded away, one of our architects decided to try and do something about it and started tech talks over lunch. It would be easy to understate the amount of effort it took to get it off the ground and for that we'll always be grateful to the originator in Belfast Mark Ingram. The idea of the brown bag sessions was you didn't have to be an expert in the topic just that you wanted to learn about it and wanted to share what you had found. There's only 1 rule which is you have to start off the session with a joke and my god we've had some terribles ones :p

The talks were very sucessful but one thing we struggled with a bit was cadence. On average we had 6 a year for the first two years. It was great but we wanted more and weirdly the longer the time between talks I think the more hesitant people were to sign up due to 'heightened expectations' so we tried a reboot this year. Myself and another manager decided to take the onus to prepare a bit of a backlog of talks so we could step in as needed. The idea originally was to have a bi-weekly cadence for these talks because we're not a huge workplace (65ish) and so finding more than 20/25 volunteers for talks each year is a bit tricky. So I guess I would like to talk about some of the things we've done to increase the rate of talks

- Find a theme : Being able to talk about anythign and everything is a gift but also it can be really hard for inexperienced speakers to know if they have a topic people would want to hear (real talk - yeah you do so go for it!) so we have tried to have series of talks. Initially it was a Data Structure and Algorithm set of talks but now we seem to have had a an organic IOT theme start up and capture the imagination.

- Ask people to talk about what their currently working on. There's a fair amount of change in technology in our work, long may it continue!, so sharing the battle learned lessons with each other is a great way of sharing institutional knowledge and briding the organizational gap that can come about from having many autonomous teams.

- Mix it up. So our talks are normally lunchtime and have a pretty consistent format which is why we jumped at the chance when we heard about Google HashCode to get together and form some teams. Not only was it a different format, in being hands on, but also was at a different time so was accessible to different people. This was the instigator for us starting some group Kata sessions.

- Bleed by example. I think putting yourself out there to talk about something you're not an expert on helps. It shows that there's no need to be worried about not having all the answers

Having a fixed block of related talks was really useful with attendance as well. What we found was this has caused us to move closer to a weekly cadence which was at the start unthinkable (disclaimer - we're only 3 months in with this but yep we've just had our 10th session of the year). We've had two of our co-ops/intern students give talks which was brilliant (they both did a brilliant job!) and lots of diverse topics from blockchain to testing web components and lots in between.

We've also as a pre-cursor to a bookclub started a technical library in the office. I think in terms of logistics that's going to have to be converted to an electronic format (we previously had access to safari online and it was excellent) but that's something we're definitely looking at currently and it's great getting some tips from people who have done it and have the t-shirt.

That's what we've done so far this year but what's next. Well this week we are having our first Kata session over lunch and our next special run (after 5 Kata sessions) is now going to be based on LunchConf and watching the experts giving some conference talks. This should also reduce our need to find and harass volunteers too :)

The other goal is to start using our lunchtime sessions as launchpad sessions to start encouraging talks at local meetups etc. We're a friendly audience which can act as a warm-up or incubator for talks and ideas and allow for feedback.

I could ramble on about this for a long time but for now I'll shut up!