Oh yes, had that happen a few times.
In addition, you get a few people (sometimes very few) who are keen to present but the majority who are happy to simply attend and don’t put much effort into presenting. As long as you can keep the balance good, it won’t peter out over time. - Glav From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Coates (DX AUSTRALIA) Sent: Tuesday, 9 February 2016 4:21 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Subject: SPAM-LOW: RE: [OT] Internal Developer Training 7’s probably at the bottom end of enough for critical mass. You don’t need many people to be on leave, sick or working on that urgent project before someone’s doing a presentation they spent 6 hours of their own time prepping for to 2 or 3 people. Is there anyone else in the org you could rope in? Testers, *gasp* designers? Etc? Andrew Coates, ME, MCPD, MCSD MCTS, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft, 1 Epping Road, NORTH RYDE NSW 2113 Ph: +61 (2) 9870 2719 • Mob +61 (416) 134 993 • Fax: +61 (2) 9870 2400 • <http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat> http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com <mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Dave Walker Sent: Tuesday, 9 February 2016 4:16 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com <mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> > Subject: RE: [OT] Internal Developer Training Cheers this looks awesome! Team is 7 people so not small. On 9 Feb 2016 17:22, "Andrew Coates (DX AUSTRALIA)" <andrew.coa...@microsoft.com <mailto:andrew.coa...@microsoft.com> > wrote: Hi Dave, How big is your team? One of the things we’ve seen work well is to have a regular “internal user group” every fortnight, put 2 hours aside over lunch or towards the end of the day, bring in pizza, and have someone from your team do a general technical presentation (45-60 min). Then have someone present a technical overview of their project (or part thereof). For example: Time Topic Presenter 2:00-2:15 Welcome, Q&A Group Leader 2:15-3:15 Technical Presentation (e.g. “Using Windows Communication Foundation to Interface with SAP”) Developer/Architect from within organisation 3:15-3:30 Break All 3:30-4:00 Project Presentation (e.g. “Project Blackcombe: Challenges, Solutions and Status”) Project Blackcombe lead developer 4:00-5:00 Drinks/Networking All Over 6 meetings you could do something like this: Technology Session Internal Session Month 1 Customising Office with Add-ins Exposing our CRM information inside the firewall Month 2 jQuery integration in VS2015 How we updated our external site to use Bootstrap Month 3 Branching and Merging – a primer Project “Discovery”’s use of TFS for source control Month 4 Mobile Client Development Smackdown – Native vs Xamarin vs Cordova vs HTML5 Deploying our new ERP solution Month 5 Using geographic data in SQL2014 Geolocating our customers Month 6 Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming Adding unit tests to the project “Conquistador” code base Make a bit of a big deal about the group. Encourage people to present (give them a speaker shirt or something). Get evals at the end of each session. Give the top speaker for the year a trip to Ignite, or something. Note that technical presentations don’t have to be original – there are heaps of repositories of up-to-date technical presentations complete with presenter notes, demo scripts and so on. Giving a developer a presentation to deliver means that they’ll go away and play with the tech so they can at least run the demos. It gives them a bunch of soft skills as well, and it makes them the internal “expert” in that thing. People will ask them questions about it and that will kick off the cycle of discovery for them. They’ll tend to look up the answer to those questions if they don’t already know. Note that you’ll need an exec sponsor for this – taking the team off the tools for a couple of hours (or 3) a month is a commitment they’ll need to support. This works even better if it’s not just your team – cross-pollination and emergence of technical centres of excellence within the organisation are very desirable things. Happy to chat more either here or offline if you like. Cheers, Coatsy. Andrew Coates, ME, MCPD, MCSD MCTS, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft, 1 Epping Road, NORTH RYDE NSW 2113 Ph: +61 (2) 9870 2719 <tel:%2B61%20%282%29%209870%202719> • Mob +61 (416) 134 993 <tel:%2B61%20%28416%29%20134%20993> • Fax: +61 (2) 9870 2400 <tel:%2B61%20%282%29%209870%202400> • <https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fblogs.msdn.com%2facoat&data=01%7c01%7cACOAT%40064d.mgd.microsoft.com%7c093dbbbc4702488bdb5608d331101198%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=v6%2f09YVCpoce37I3OC8T%2bo7GmUAmwJ5lFB1QVfuVhFg%3d> http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com <mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com <mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> ] On Behalf Of Dave Walker Sent: Tuesday, 9 February 2016 1:01 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com <mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> > Subject: [OT] Internal Developer Training Hi all, I've recently taken over a new team which has a wide variety of technical skill from complete beginner to senior developer. Talking to the team I've found that especially their C# skillsets are limited and can be greatly improved. So far we've organised for everyone to have a pluralsight account and encouragement is given to spend work time watching videos however it feels a little bit disconnected. I'd really like to have a more formal ongoing set of training but as it stands I have no experience implementing this. There is limited budget so can't just send everyone off on a training course and not really looking for an overnight fix but more of a program that improves different skills over time to a certain level. My thoughts for now were to mix between: * Book club - everyone reads a chapter of 'Clean code' and we gather weekly to discuss it * Pluralsight club - same but with a pluralsight video * One on one peer programming where the more senior members help the less experienced * Demo sessions/lectures by more experienced developers from outside the team Has anyone else ever tried to take on something like this? If so how did you go about it and what advice can you give about this? Cheers, Dave
