What’s the fuzz about “Crash Courses” all about?
Webstep Ab is a consulting firm, where I work, as a consultant and Team-lead focusing on competence-increasing activities. We run Crash Courses, as well as other formats of courses/seminars for our employees. This blogpost will tell you how and why we run this format.
We like to learn
We, the consultants at Webstep AB, try to increase our competence so that we are better prepared to consult at our clients projects. We like the cognitive challenges we face when learning new technical things and theories. As a result, between us, we have expert knowledge on many cool things within Information Technology. IT is though a big field, that often feels too big for one person to know everything. We’ve all heard the dilemma about the full-stack-developer; Many people say “there is no such thing” as there are not many people who know how to (for example) optimise their code so it run as fast as possible on a specific AMD chipset, while the people who are actually experts in that might not know Typescript or Search Engine Optimisation. The one that knows all of these disciplines and everything in between is probably a unicorn.
To find out what’s missing, we continuously ask our colleagues (many times a year) what they would like to learn or which skills they would like to add, and then we try to find someone that knows it well to teach it.
We also like to share our own knowledge
Knowing something well and knowing something well enough to teach it are two different sides of the same coin. To teach something, one has to study the topic extensively, and know it, in and out. Going through that process creates experts. That’s why we encourage our colleagues to “bring it”- teach one lessons in an evening, throw a lightning-talk, write a blog post, join a jam-session or take part in other similar activities we run within the company.
Over the last few months we’ve been running “Crash-Courses” a 1–1.5 hours course happening in the afterwork hours (from 5 pm to 6 pm) where focus is on content, but not food or social activities. These have not been our biggest seminars, but still we’ve had some people turn up, that want to learn these things, and fill in some gaps, on their way to become unicorns. I attended a “IOS development” course my self, and thought it was super good. In an hour I learned how to build IOS app with xcode, and have since then built an Augmented Reality app that can recognise specific types of payment-cards and display information about them. I’m no expert, but I got enough knowledge to get started on my project and implement a Proof of Concept for my idea.
A Spring-Boot Crash-Course
Inspired by what I learned on the IOS course, I teamed up with my colleague Fredrik Åhman, and together we held a Crash Course in Backend API development with Spring-Boot in the beginning of August.
You might think this would maybe be too basic topic for most IT-consultants with many years of experience, but despite summer-vacations still being on, few guys attended, for example, a test-automator, frontend guys and backend guys who have focused on other things through the ages and wanted to get acquainted with Spring-Boot.
We ran through the history of backend development, showed some code-samples on how to build the basic Spring-Boot app, how injection works, etc, and at last showed where to start (http://start.spring.io) and how to get up and running with Spring-Boot development.
The course was nice, and relaxed, and we got interesting questions, and good conversation going afterwards, covering topics such as future of API development, and if Spring-Boot was it, or something else. We felt it was well received and filled in some gaps.
Next up in the series of Crash-Courses we’ll do a quick course on API testing with cucumber. We also talked about running a session on development with Firebase and Angular 8, possibly AWS Lambdas and then we’ll continue try to find topics that fit into the frame of crash-course.
Why Crash-Course ?
The crash-course format is just one of the formats we’ve been working with here at Webstep. The idea here is to go through the basics of a small topic in short amount of time, so anyone who attends can start using the technique the day after. For me this is optimal, as I get good grounds to start hacking away, and I like learning like that. Other people like to read a blog or a book or study the theory for longer before taking off and implementing something.
In the end, what we’ve discovered is that people learn in very different ways, and we try to cater for these, as well as we can.
Lastly , the name “Crash-course” comes from the idea that you learn a lot of something in a very short space of time.
