Refactoring the way we learn: A JuniorDev workshop!

JuniorDev is a community that LJ Kenward and I have been organising for a little over a year now. So far this has involved many regular and ad hoc Meetups, a regular newsletter and speaking engagements, all aimed at Junior Developers. On the 8th July we ran our first ever workshop and it was an absolute blast!

We called our workshop Refactor and the concept was a workshop that helped to fill in the gaps for Junior Developers. Both LJ and I completed a bootcamp to make the jump into the world of dev, but as we know Juniors come from all sorts of avenues. We’ve found that no matter how you got there, when you land a job and start working there’s inevitably a bunch of stuff they didn’t mention in “school”. We thought we’d solve our own problem by running a workshop for our own knowledge gaps!

So where do we start!? Cause let’s be honest, there might be more than one gap in our knowledge 😮. For us, it had to be deployments. At the time, this was little more that a mysterious (and seemingly convoluted) process that somehow ran our tests and got us from Git repo to the Big Bad Web. We hypothesised that we were not alone!

Finding An Instructor

We thought long and hard about who we’d like to be the instructor for our workshop. We wanted someone that we could collaborate well with, had presentational chops, and of course the knowledge to deliver a killer workshop.

Enter Matt Hilton. I met Matt at the second ever JuniorDev Meetup. While definitely not a Junior Developer, he proved to be an engaged enthusiastic member of the community. At the time Matt was consulting at Readify and had 10 years of experience under his belt. Also, it just so happened that the topic of deployment pipelines was something Matt had a lot of experience implementing and training people on.

Refactor: Build & Deploy was born.

Developing The Course

Over the next couple months we took advantage of the amazing cafe scene around Melbourne and began the process of creating our first workshop.

Throughout the process we wanted to make sure the workshop felt like a JuniorDev workshop. We needed to make sure that, while we delivered on the knowledge promised, the workshop was fun, engaging and considerate of the varying experience levels in the room. We needed to make sure we captured the JuniorDev community vibe and created an open and welcoming environment on the day.

We didn’t want students to be lectured at all day, so we were keen to break it up to keep everyone engaged. In the end we chose to include a number of activities that involved people getting out of their seats and moving, and practical problem solving tasks.

And the winner is… Diversity! 🎉

Diversity has been a core value for us since the beginning of JuniorDev. We were thrilled to see the diversity of our attendees across gender, age and experience. Over 50% of our attendees identified as women. We have the benefit of being a newer Community, which means that we’ve been able to build diversity in from the beginning. The Refactor workshop further demonstrated to us our successes in diversity and inclusion.

Attendees ranged from Juniors at major tech companies around Melbourne (including Xero, Envato, ThoughtWorks, 99designs, Culture Amp and Zendesk), smaller agencies, those looking for work and still studying. It was great to see an enthusiastic and engaged Junior community who are aware of their own gaps in knowledge and keen to fill them.

JuniorDev recently kicked off a series of interviews. You may recognise our first interviewee, Mia in the picture below. It was at Refactor that we first met her.

On The Day

In the morning session we focused on concepts and environment architecture. Some things we covered included:

• Understanding of deployment pipelines concepts.
• Context of when/why/how
• Flow between environments (Local -> Dev -> Prod)
• High-level coverage of more advanced concepts including continuous deployment and feature flags

LJ and I work at Xero and JuniorDev has been lucky enough to have a lot of support from Xero. Refactor was no exception with Xero sponsoring the venue and food. After an early Saturday morning wake up call and some hurried last minute setup we were ready to roll. The Melbourne Xero office has some amazing facilities to take advantage of and learning sessions were held in a huge room that offered a projector and walls covered in whiteboard paint so we could draw all over them!

For breaks we were able to take advantage of another huge space that offered bonafide barista coffee machine ☕️, fruit bowl, comfy lounge and pool table! Lunch was a combo of some tasty salads and burgers and we decided to go with a make-your-own buffet style setup. This helped to continue the casual friendly vibe we were going for. The space allowed us to sit together, chat and relax as we shared a lunch. Sharing a meal with people is such a simple, yet powerful act that brings people together and helps to keep conversations rolling.

In the afternoon we worked on practical exercises where Matt led the students through building a deployment pipeline using the Job Board sample app we provided. We all know that there are a tonne of things that can cause a build to break, so before students could get the deployment passing they had to fix several curve balls we threw at them, including Webpack bundle issues and broken unit tests. We were hoping to provide a basic understanding of where deployment issues might arise and what a broken deployment looks like when they do. At the end of the day one of our aims was that all students could walk away with an app and pipeline that they could build on and play with at home. To achieve this we used Travis for deployments and created a basic app using the MERN stack.

The End Is Only The Beginning

We finished up with an inaugural class photo, some chilled drinks and a couple games of pool in the breakout area. It was so good to see many of the attendees hang around for a while and chat with new friends. There are many parts to the JuniorDev community and days like these are a fantastic way for everyone to participate and create and strengthen friendships. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive with immediate enquiries for details of the next one. It has been a few months since Refactor: Build & Deploy and in that time LJ and I have been busy with many other aspects of JuniorDev. We haven’t forgotten about Refactor though and will be working hard in the coming months to bring more workshops for Junior Developers!