Teaching and learning

At LaunchDarkly, we’ve been hiring really aggressively, because we’re doing amazing things. (Come work with me!)

That means that we are also doing a bunch of training, and I’ve been working on doing the training for our non-technical employees, folks like marketing, design, outbound sales. They’re important to our success and they have a TON of domain knowledge that I don’t have, but we’re all going to work together more successfully if they know what they’re selling. Also, selfishly, the more people who can help work a table at a conference, the easier it is for everyone working at the conference.

Me, I’ve been doing tech for 20 years, at all levels, including hardware through to cloud. I bring a ton of domain knowledge with me every time I start a new job. But for this training, we need to explain enough about the software lifecycle to be able to talk about the problems that LaunchDarkly solves. That gave me a chance to really dig in and figure out how to explain the basics in a way that’s useful to people who haven’t been accidentally drinking from the devops firehose.

• What are developers trying to do? What does their work life look like?
• What is deployment and how is it hard?
• How does software get to the user?
• What are waterfall and agile and how does that relate to us?
• What are APIs, SDKs, CDNs, CI/CD, devops, feature flags, polling and streaming updates?
• What’s a monolith vs a microservice?
• Why wouldn’t everyone just build their own software?
• What is Software as a Service?

It was satisfying to realize that I can define and describe all of that in pithy and accessible terms for people. It’s the same thrill I get from writing a really solid document. I know that I am helping actual humans by describing something they need at the moment they need it.

I hadn’t thought about internal training as being part of my job duties, but when we realized we needed it, it seemed logical and easy to do it. After all, my whole purpose is explaining the product to people, and understanding and explaining people’s pain points to my company. This is a natural fit. Plus it was super fun!

In my infinite free time, I’m thinking about recording these explanations with a couple slides, so we have bite-sized concepts when people want to look them up.