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Sneak Peek of our chat with Sheena O’Connell, hosted by Cheuk Ting Ho and Tereza Iofciu.
Sheena began her career as a software engineer and technical leader across multiple startups, but her passion for education led her to spend the last five years reimagining how people learn to code professionally. Working within the nonprofit sector, she built alternative education systems from the ground up and developed deep expertise in effective teaching, educator development, and the structural limitations of traditional education models. Sheena is the founder of Prelude.tech, where she delivers rigorous technical training alongside consultation and coaching for technical educators and organizations with education functions. She also leads the Guild of Educators, a community she founded to empower technology educators through shared resources, support, and evidence-based teaching practices.
In this episode, Sheena O’Connell tells us about her journey, the importance of community and good practices for teachers and eductuoions in python, organizational psychology and how herself has become involve in this journey. We talk about how to enable a 10 x team and how to enable the community through guild of educators.
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Get to know Sheena O'Connell
Sheena's early career saw her working as a software engineer and technical leader across multiple startups. But it was her passion for education that led her to devote the last 5+ years to re-imagining how we teach people to code professionally. Over the last half decade she has had the opportunity to work in the non-profit space and build alternative education systems from the ground up. Along the way she has learned a lot about how to teach well, how to build organisational systems that teach well, and why traditional education systems fall short. As a founder of Prelude.tech, she provides rigorous technical training, as well as consultating, and coaching for technical educators, and organisations with education functions (for example grad programs and similar). Additionally, she leads the Guild of Educators, a community she founded to empower tech educators through shared resources, support, and evidence-based teaching practices.
Your hosts
After having a career as a Data Scientist and Developer Advocate, Cheuk dedicated her work to the open-source community and working as a community manager at OpenSSF. She has co-founded Humble Data, a beginner Python workshop that has been happening around the world. She has served the EuroPython Society board for two years and is now a fellow and director of the Python Software Foundation.
Before data leadership coaching, she has worked for over 15 years in Data Science, Data Engineering, Product Management and training teams in such roles. She is the co-organizer of PyLadies Hamburg. She is part of the Python Software Foundation Code of Conduct and Diversity & Inclusion working groups. She has been awarded the Python Software Foundation 2021 Q1 community service award. She is also part of the DISC Steering Committee team and a Data Visualisation Ambassador for Observable.