Fostering Technical Excellence Through Creative Collaboration
We at Codecademy believe that engineering is a team sport, and we are a teaching/learning organization at our core. This is why we find it so valuable to put on events where we can foster relationships and collaborate and learn from each other. For us, this is not simply a disjointed set of events but a larger and coordinated initiative to promote a growth culture. We call this our Tech Community.
Why do we have a Tech Community?
Our Company’s Core Values are:
- We are learners.
- We improve relentlessly.
- We think deeply.
- We persevere.
- We win as a team.
We believe that learning is not an action; it is a lifestyle, and the best place to learn is from your peers.
In our Tech Community, we learn about new technologies, best practices, and how we can improve our internal processes. We discuss topics. We debate the merits and pitfalls of principles, and we inspire each other to innovate. These learnings are high quality, as not only can they be timely and thorough, but they can be relevant to our company context including tech stack, ongoing initiatives, and values.
In addition to pure information acquisition, many of our events give opportunities to work with people from other teams and even other departments. This helps us identify area experts, understand who is advancing what technologies, and really just develop our mental model for each other. In this remote work environment, we don’t get socialization and visibility as a by-product of being physically near each other, so we need to be intentional about how we network, connect, and work together as a broader team.
The last point I will make is, participating in (and yes leading) the Tech Community is fun. We get to break up the routines and stresses of our everyday work with opportunities to remind us why we do this, why we love technology. This isn’t me being selflessly altruistic. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown talks about how fun can open up the mind, encourage innovation, and help us work at our highest potential. This is not new. Engagement and satisfaction have long been known to correlate to productivity and retention.
To this point, I have been discussing our Tech Community in broad terms, but what is it?
At Codecademy, our Tech Community is made up of 8 pillars. Each pillar is led by one or two engineers. Our pillars are …
Tech Reading
One of the easiest ways to get started in the Tech Community is to participate with Tech Readings. Despite the name, in tech reading we all read, watch, or listen to an article, video, podcast episode, etc, and we come together to discuss and share our thoughts and opinions. Many times changes to our practices will fall out of an area identified in Tech Reading.
Pragmatic Engineer Book Club
Sharing an idea or tutorial is nice, but to gain a deep understanding of a particular area, you will want to check out our book club. In it, we collectively work through a full (or large portions of a) book. The same types of discussions and initiatives come out of it, but in a more deep and thoroughly investigated topic.
Technical Blogs
In addition to reading other’s work, we give our own engineers opportunities to write and publish their own work. Engineers can share ideas and learning in a way that can create personal visibility in the broader industry as well as potentially feeding into our Tech Reading for internal awareness.
Lightning Talks
For those who prefer to share their knowledge orally rather than through the written word, we have Lightning Talks, a set of fast paced (2–5 minutes) talks on any topic you want. These topics can be technical or non-technical. We encourage people to bring their full self to work, so this might be sharing a recipe, demoing programmatically generated music, or discussing the wonders of cephalopods.
Brown bags
2–5 minutes is not a lot of time to go into great detail. For the deep technical dives, we use brown bags. They are called brown bags because traditionally they happen over lunch with lunch provided. They tend to be around 45 minutes, where the presenter does a lesson on relevant topic. We have done brown bags on managing MongoDB databases, new services that we have built, and more.
Dev Workshops
Lightning Talks and Brown Bags tend to be very presentational with the information flowing in one direction. Many people learn by doing. For those people, our Dev Workshops are a great opportunity to learn something by actually playing with it and trying to solve pre-determined challenges. It is done collaboratively in a group. We start out all together to discuss the problems and answer questions, and then we breakout into breakout rooms to explore the example challenges.
Hackathons
The pinnacle of “learning by doing” is our Hackathons. At Codecademy, we believe good ideas can come from anywhere. Hackathons are our company’s way to allow anyone with an idea to garner support and be given up to three days to create a proof of concept. This encourages collaboration, as anyone throughout our whole company can participate. It is fun to work on a project you personally care about. And it fosters innovation, as around one third of the projects eventually make it into production.
Conferences & Classes
Lastly, we certainly acknowledge there is much to learn outside our own company. Our Conferences and Classes pillar is there to encourage and coordinate attending industry conferences and taking classes. Each employee has an education stipend for this very type of growth opportunity.
What’s Next
All of these pillars are powerful on their own, but in order to enact change and build a sense of camaraderie/stewardship, they need to work together. And that’s the part we’ve been missing. In the next few weeks, our Tech Community leaders will be embarking on a journey to unite our pillars. We’ve got some exciting updates coming so stay tuned!
