A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Facilitating a Cloud Workshop
Last month, I was invited to facilitate a workshop for women++ about how to build a serverless app on AWS. In this article, I’ll share how I prepared and facilitated this workshop.
When I was asked to be an ambassador for the women friendly hackathon Hack’n’Lead organized by women++, I was immediately convinced by its setup: Preparation events to build skills in advance, on-site mentors during the event, the availability of child-care and the overall focus on learning! This setup attracts a more female audience than the typical hackathon without excluding anyone — and I welcome any initiatives towards more diversity in tech.
In addition to being an ambassador, I wanted to further help out by providing a preparation event to participants. However, I also knew I would face some challenges:
- Unknown knowledge of participants
I did not really know what level of knowledge the participants already had. Still, I wanted to make sure that everyone could learn something during the workshop. - How to plan the time
I have done some conference talks before, so I have experience in timing those. But I wasn’t really sure how to time exercises — this is of course further complicated by the first challenge mentioned.
So how did I prepare and facilitate this workshop?
Preparation
Choosing the topic
Finding a good topic was probably the easiest part for me: I’m comfortable working on the AWS cloud and enjoy using their serverless offering — also for private projects (e.g. check out how I wrote a tracker for my favourite gym-class using AWS Lambda). This was the perfect choice for a hackathon, since it supports rapid prototyping at practically no cost at all.
Writing a compelling workshop description
Based on the workshop description, potential participants would decide whether they wanted to join or not, so I spent some time on making sure it gives a good overview of the goals while being as short as possible. With some help and feedback, I arrived at the following description:
This is an on-site, hands-on workshop.
During this workshop, you will learn how the cloud can be used to quickly and cheaply build a backend application. This is especially useful for the rapid prototyping required during a hackathon. After a short overview of different cloud providers and some tricks to ensure you stay in control of your budget, you will build your first Lambda function on AWS. In a second step, this function will be extended and combined with other serverless services.
At the end of the workshop, we’ll cover possible tools and the next steps to improve further your first draft of your cloud-native backend application.
Preparing slides
When preparing the slides, I was facing the first of my anticipated challenges: How can you explain a topic as complex as serverless computing when you don’t know what pre-existing knowledge your participants have?
I chose to start with a fairly basic introduction to the cloud and different cloud computing models but move fairly quickly to the exercises. This way, everyone could understand the context and thus follow the exercises later on.
From theory to practice: preparing exercises
Since I wanted to do a hands-on workshop, I needed some exercises. Good exercises should start off easy to make participants comfortable with them, but get gradually more complex and ideally result in a nice combined solution.
I decided to use the example of a “To do” app (a common example in programming workshops) and build different parts of the functionality during the separate parts of the exercises. I wrote some high-level instructions for the exercises, but expected to cover the details directly in the workshop.
Facilitation
Setting up
I actually did not have to set anything up myself for the workshop: The wonderful volunteers from women++ together with Constructor Learning made sure we had a nice room, enough tables and chairs and even some food and drinks available. Thank you for the fantastic preparation!
Running the workshop
When running the workshop, I was facing the second of my anticipated challenges: I had no idea how fast we would be able to progress with the exercises. I didn’t even know in advance if participants would prefer to work on the exercises alone or together in the group (I polled their preferences during the workshop).
During preparation, I had opted to make sure I had definitely enough exercises and ideas prepared. So I was not too surprised that we did not manage to finish all of them. But I believe it was more important to make sure everyone could follow along instead of just pushing through. During the exercises I made sure to ask around for issues and to ensure that everyone could get at least some part running and have their own personal success story that evening!
Finishing up
Towards the end of the workshop, I reviewed what we had achieved together and showed participants how they could continue working on the exercises — or of course also on their own ideas and projects!
Conclusion
Lessons Learned
- Practical exercises always take longer than planned. I had planned a lot more example exercises than we actually had time for. But thanks to the written instructions, participants were able to continue working on them even after the workshop.
- Make sure your written instructions exactly match the order of the workshop. I had provided some written instructions for most of the exercises, but they did not cover my starting example. I had caused quite a bit of confusion with this during the workshop. After the workshop, I fixed that by splitting the exercises into separate, clearly named parts.
- Workshops are fun! I enjoyed both the preparation as well as the actual workshop 😊 I had fun diving deeper into a topic I’m intrested in and sharing that knowledge during the workshop.
Links
Here you can find some links related to my AWS serverless workshop:
Hack’n’Lead is an inclusive and non-profit hackathon taking place on the weekend of 11–12 November 2023 in Zurich, offering: mentorship support, childcare on-site, no overnight coding and preparatory events leading to the event.
You can register your interest here now to receive more information about future workshops and know beforehand when applications open.
Iris Hunkeler is a passionate Software Engineer based in Zurich (Switzerland). She has worked for clients in various industries such as public administration, e-commerce or banking. Her main interests are backend development, cloud and DevOps. She is motivated by finding achievable and elegant solutions to complex problems to help her clients reach their individual goals.