How I Accelerated My Learning by Building a Community

In 2014 I built a habit of using an hour each day to develop my skills. After a few months, this began to pay off. People started asking me why I was getting different results and then for advice. I seemed to be on the right track and was keen to include others to learn together.

Videos from conferences introduced many new ideas. One on testing and refactoring over “the big rewrite” had hit a nerve, and I wanted to share it with my team to see what they thought. I booked a meeting room one lunchtime and sent an email to my colleagues to watch it with me. I did not know who would come, but we filled the room to my surprise.

Then my manager came in, “I have been told to come to make sure you are not wasting people’s time”, he said before sitting down by the door. The video was opinionated but well-received. Then about ten minutes from the end, my manager stood up and walked out. “I guess I am wasting people’s time,” I thought.

The first thing the next day, my manager rushed into my office with his cycling helmet still on; he started speaking fast. “Dan, that video you showed yesterday; I loved it. Sorry, I missed the end. I had to pick up my daughter from nursery. Do you have any more? Can we show one every week?” So every Tuesday at lunchtime, I showed the best video I had watched that week, followed by a brief discussion on how it related to us.

One of the problems where I worked was although it was full of great technical people, they were siloed away in over twenty-five teams that worked in isolation. Shortly after I started, I spent months struggling to learn an old web technology with poor documentation. A year later, I found out a guy who had written a book on that technology had been in an office down the corridor but had left six months earlier.

I talked to my manager about expanding the sessions to tap into the knowledge of the other teams. I wanted to create the experience of external Meetup groups for people who did not have their evenings free. “I am not going to stop you”, he said, “but what you are attempting is cultural change. It will not happen quickly”. Fortunately, I had three years left on my contract.

I created a Meetup group, added that week’s talk, and, breaking the guidelines, sent an organisation-wide email to invite everyone. The response meant I had to book a bigger room. As the weekly sessions continued, people from different teams started interacting, “we tried that in our team, and it worked well”, or “we tried that and ran into problems”. I began asking people if they would like to give live talks to share their experiences. I scheduled the events in Meetup, and we started holding sessions in the lecture theatre.

One week we watched a conference video of Josh Long presenting Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. In the discussion, one person said, “This is great, but that guy talks so fast, he would do my head in”. I reached out on Twitter to Josh and told him this and asked, jokingly, if he would like to come in and present in person to wind the guy up. I got the reply “sure”. Josh was coming to London for a conference and would be happy to visit the day before.

I booked the lecture theatre and set up an event on Meetup. Over 120 people signed up, which was impressive in an organisation with at most 200 technical staff. I picked Josh up from the station at 9 am. He had landed at Heathrow from San Fransico two hours earlier. He took and shower, drank several coffees, and at 10 am gave a talk to a packed lecture theatre. He kept going and going with incredible energy. His scheduled one hour slot went on for two and a half hours after all the questions. He collapsed in a heap when everyone left, and I gratefully took him to lunch.

What I had been doing had been noticed, and I was asked if I would like to formalise what I was doing as a Technical Seminars Programme. Jenny, a UX architect, joined me, and we were given a budget for the speaker’s expenses and a few hours of work time per week to work on events.

Jenny and I developed Skills Mapper. The tool allowed people to tell us what tools, techniques, and technologies they were interested in, learning and using. We used a “skills graph” to identify experts and matched people together to form study groups. We supported communities of practice with a new technology called Slack. We then created a programme of talks from internal and external speakers.

We attracted many great speakers. I was amazed how open even very well known people were willing to give their time to talk about what they were passionate about. After being introduced to James Lewis, he came in for coffee and offered support from Thoughtworks through their pro-bono programme. James and other Thoughtworks colleagues came in to run a technology radar session for the organisation with representatives from each team. Even with the skills mapper, there were many surprises, including how many people were using Spring Boot, partly due to Josh Long introducing it the year before. Now people wanted training, and we started putting that together.

Building this community was fantastic. I loved it when people I did not know came up to me in the corridor with suggestions or told me what they had learned had given them the confidence to apply for challenging roles at the end of their contract.

At the end of my contract, I went for an exit interview. The HR person said to me, “You know Dan, I have had four exit interviews in the past month, and three of them mentioned the sessions you organise as the thing they will miss most about working here”.

Including other people in my learning was the most rewarding thing I have done in my career so far, and I would love to do it again. I loved the amount I learned and all the people I met. It also did great things for my confidence and developing skills outside of technology. The big surprise was how open people were to contributing and participating. All I needed to do was start the ball rolling.