Hi
Hi everybody and welcome to our PyPodcats
series of Hidden Figures of Python
and today we have as a guest Sheena O'Connell
all the way from South Africa
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so today's hosts are Cheuk and me
so I'm uh Tereza
I live in Hamburg and I'm part of the PyLadies Hamburg
and I'm also data and the career coach
and data freelancer
hi I'm Cheuk and um
I am I love Python
ha ha ha ha
OK that's it
so uh
we have our guest Sheena here
so Sheena do you want to introduce yourself
I've been coding for a long time in Python
it is my love language um
and I got to spend about 5 years working in tech
education uh
in the non profit space in South Africa
and it was great and I learned a lot there
so now what I'm doing is I teach for a living and I try
try to get other educators um
connected and leveling up in
nice ways um
so I've got a company that does
advanced Django training and soft skills training
because that stuff is actually pretty hard um
and I have
I run a community called the Guild of Educators where
um anybody who teaches code
or wants to teach code can come and join and hang out
um we're starting a teacher's mentorship program
so if you wanna help a teacher level up
then you can join that or um
if you're a teacher who wants to get better at code
come and join that um
and then the last thing that I'm
involved with at the moment is PyCon Africa
so I'm currently the local chair of
of PyCon Africa
it's happening in my hometown in Johannesburg
South Africa and actually I
I do have a lot of question about Johannesburg
and PyCon Africa shall we start with PyCon Africa
and then we can also talk more about your work
sounds good
yeah so for PyCon Africa I
I wonder like
so for for folks who never heard of it
like is it always going to be in
you know
South Africa or is it going to be travelling around
and do you have an other organisation behind it
and how does it work good questions
it does travel around
so it's not always in the same country
um
this is the first time we're doing it in South Africa
it's the first time we're doing a major
like International Python conference in
southern Africa
so it's quite a I think it's gonna be quite impactful
but yes it travels around um
I'm not actually sure where we'll do it next year
PyCon Africa
is basically run by two separate organizations
there's the international committee um
and those are the folks who just like
stay with the conference wherever it goes
and then there's the local committee
so the people on the ground who know what's
what to organise the venue and
and all of that so our local committee um
generally organizes PyCon South Africa every year
and like it's quite an experienced team um
it's quite a small team but do good stuff um yeah
so that's how it works
so we're basically joining forces yeah
what do you expect to be different from like
let's say last year PyCon South Africa
alright so it's gonna be a bigger conference um
we are reaching further
we're getting a lot more international attention
and we've got some um
interesting people who are attending so for example
Dawn Wages is one of our key notes and she's the uh
president of the PSF and that's wonderful
and it's gonna be great to bring her here
so I I don't think we would be able to get as
like high profile people in a
for PyCon South Africa generally um
so that's one of the things
but the other thing is that
we're putting a lot more effort into giving
financial assistance to folks who otherwise would
not be able to come so
we're working
hard to try and bring people in from the surrounding
southern African countries
and folks from across Africa as well
but we really wanna like because this is the first um
big
international conference in southern Africa for Python
we wanna just make good use of that so yeah
a lot of effort is being put into financial assistance
and that's expensive
so we're doing a lot more around fundraising
we've got a donations drive as well
that's gonna help with that yeah
those are the main differences
what are the challenges of organizing a conference
in Africa because you have world travel right
you have seen PyConUS
EuroPython all these different conferences
so what are the challenges to organize
a conference in Africa compared to
let's say you know PyConUS or a European conference
so I think
I've never organized a conference anywhere else
so I can't give a direct comparison
but I can say that
there are probably challenges that are
standard across the board
I mean PyCon Africa is in a way a a newish conference
it's been going on for a little while
but it's had some gaps and and things like that
so like
a more established conference
has better systems in place
and has um
better documentation in place and things like that
and so
there's a lot of just figuring things out and swarming
and whenever you want to get
it's a large group of people who are involved
like there's
there's a lot of people on the international committee
and if you've got a large group of volunteers
then it's kind of hard to figure out
like wrangling volunteers is hard in general
um especially if you want to do things to a deadline
and to a high standard
and not end up doing everything yourself
and things like that
so there's a lot of just like management challenges
like figuring out who
who are the productive people and what's
what skills does everybody bring to the table
and things like that
like that's been that's been tricky
and I think in Africa, Africa specifically there
there are challenges around like
network connectivity and things like that
that comes up and it's also somewhat challenging
because we do have people who are organizing
who are in different time zones
and so we need to wrangle schedules quite a lot
and some people have jobs
some people don't have jobs
some people are students
and so that's all that's all challenging to wrangle
and there's also a lot of cultural differences
so our International Committee
it's spread across multiple countries
and a lot of the time when people think of Africa
they think of it as like
just like a blob and everything's the same
and it's really not like
there are very big cultural differences
between different African countries
and
those cultural differences come with different norms
and therefore different expectations
and um
different misunderstandings
so it's
important to just take a lot of care in communicating
like chaos is the default state
and so you have to work hard to
make sure that things are well organized
I think those are the main things
I wanted to ask a little bit about
you've been in different communities and also in Europe
and as Cheuk said also in the States
you saw PyConUS
how is the community different in Africa
or South Africa so can you speak for both or
yeah so I've
I've only been to PyCon South Africa and PyCon Namibia
in Africa and even these two communities are very
very different so in South Africa
Python is already a very well established language
so most of the big corporates are using it in some way
um most of our attendees are professional people
they're they're pretty sorted
um and we do get a lot of young folks as well
who are keen to get into Python in different ways so
so that's great but it's
the fact that it's established
and there's a lot of knowledge in the country already
um a lot of skill there it
it makes things easier
if you go to somewhere like Namibia
where it's not an industry standard
then things get more difficult
it's like it's a fledgling community in a way
like the community is is strong and connected and they
they do stuff and they run their conference and
and it's all wonderful
that's like
people need somebody to learn from a lot of the time
and so with something like pack on Namibia
one of the things it's
one of the goals there is to bring skills in
so that we can share skills with
the Namibian community yeah
so so it varies from place to place
and I'm sure that a lot of African countries
are more similar to Namibia
than to South Africa and we've
we've got it like it's it's pretty good here
when did you get started with Python and how?
so I got started um
when I was in university I was coding for food
I I started I learned to code um
like as a teenager and I really liked it
so when I was studying I needed money and um
so I was just taking on these odd jobs
and at one point
somebody offered me a Django development gig um
they wanted to build this
like soccer membership website thing
and they were like can you write a Django website
and I said yes
and then I figured out how to
and through learning Django
like there
there was this book called The Django Book um
but now it's very out of date
and it's not a thing anymore
but that was my introduction to Python yeah
so I learned that and I learned Python
sort of as a side effect of trying to do this
and it was great it just fitted my
brain really well since then
like Python
wasn't taught in university or anything like that when
when I was there after university
I gravitated towards software development jobs
and I just I did a bunch of different things
but I always missed Python
and then as soon as I could work with Python again
I jumped on it yeah
I mean
I can ask more stuff but you read a programming book
do you still read programming books
bits and pieces sometimes um
but it's very rare for me to read a whole programming
book I read a book on PHP once for a job
but like I haven't learned a lot of languages
since I learned Python um
I've
I've done a bunch of different things
I've learned PHP and I think C#
I find that I learn best
often by getting my hands dirty
so I'll dig into documentation
and something that I find as well is that like
a lot of the concepts
from one language are transferable to another
so if like a functions a functions a function um
so
a lot of the time when learning a different language
it's like you wanna
figure out how the concepts you already know
map to this other thing
and then you wanna find out what
kind of the idioms are of
of the new language
so often my way of learning is very um
I wouldn't say it's chaotic
it's it's directed towards a goal
I'll want to do a specific thing
and then I'll go and find out how to do like
all the little pieces
that I need to know in order to achieve that thing
yeah I think I
I did read the Kubernetes book
um yeah
what else I don't know
I actually wonder how many people are like
learn things like that cause I am the same
like I, I can only learn if I am doing it
cause otherwise I would just be
you know this side in
that side out right
like ha ha ha cause like
oh yeah it's
it's a it's a good read
but then like uh
what is it about hmm
can't remember ha ha
so yeah I think for me
project driven learning is very helpful
so it's like you learn you wanna learn a thing
like
let's say when I learnt react or something like that
like I've learnt a bunch of different tools
um and these tools have different tutorials
that you can follow and you can follow the tutorial
and you can stay on that golden path
and learn what they want you to learn
and you get the major concepts
and you get the major building blocks
and you're like okay cool
how do I get it to do this other thing
and then you research that and you end up learning more
um and you find out where you need to go deeper
so that's useful for me
but I, I do think that books are helpful
in a lot of places as well
because it does give you a
a narrative flow
and it helps you to kind of stay on task
for folks who are newer to programming language
I would usually say like
find a structured resource to learn from
because there's just so much stuff out there
the signal to noise ratio is really bad
so if you just find like one good trusted source
and you use that as a starting point
then that's probably good yeah
is this why you got into teaching as well as
because you
you felt like the material out there is more noise than
hmm not really
so so even in the noise
there's a lot of good stuff
uh it's just that there's like
people pull
each other in all sorts of different directions
for me
teaching was something that I always wanted to do
in some way like I um
I've always been teaching like when I was a little kid
I used to teach grownups Excel skills
and I taught the other kids maths and tutored them
and I've taught people different sports
and it's always been a thing in my life
but it's not something that I like pursued as a career
but it's always been something that I've cared about
like it's always clicked with me really well
so I was a really awkward kid and helping people with
their homework was a good source of connection
so I think a lot of it comes from that yeah
then wait you did that for free um
some people paid me but I also just
you did that for free and when I was in school
like people and stuff sometimes yes
sometimes no and it depended on the situation yeah OK
I did it I got paid
so people that people become your friend
so they can borrow your homework
like the the morning
no no
no borrowing was for free
but I liked helping people to understand stuff um
that was always a thing so I
I didn't
like all my homework in exchange for friendship
like that would be that would be a bit sad
um but it was
it was a way to connect it's like cool
you you wanna get better at this thing
let's no doubt about it like
if you're teaching person a thing
and you really want them to understand something
then you have to understand them um
so you do build some connections there
and I found that a lot with my students as well
more recently it's like you really do
like you get into each other's heads a little bit
but back to your question about like
how I got into teaching
I've been working for a bunch of startups
and I was feeling thoroughly burnt out and used up
and I was thinking about what I really
wanted to do I was like I've been
I've been working so hard
chasing other people's dreams
and what do I want to do it's like
I want to make an impact on people's lives
and education is a really amazing way to do that
I mean if you think about it
you you just have like
a bunch of conversations with a person
and then their trajectory changes in a massive way
and sometimes it's not even that hard to
to move a people a person quite significantly
so I got to a point I was like cool
I wanna work in education
I want to start a code school for for women
I want to do this this is gonna be great
and then I was thinking about like okay
what does it take to start a code school
I'm going to need um
desks and a venue and HR and payroll and and
and all of these like
things that I'm not that interested in
and if you think about like the business of education
there's there's like
so much stuff that you need to do that isn't teaching
and so I was bashing my head on this for a while
but at the time I was like
I'm taking on like random little freelance gigs
and I'm just trying to get more exposure
so I went to a PyCon
a PyCon South Africa event and I ran a workshop there
and I I like I literally just
did it so that um
more people could see what I was about
I wanted more exposure
and I wanted to teach people a thing
and I wanted to learn a thing
so so I did that
now with PyCon South Africa
you can charge for your workshops
that's just how it usually goes
um but I decided not to charge for mine because I
I was just like bring more people
and so because my workshop was the cheapest
it was very full of students
um and hahaha
some of those students were from this non profit
coding bootcamp and they kind of swarmed me afterwards
and they were like this is great
don't you wanna come and run a workshop at our place
I was like okay cool
I'll I'll try that out for free
or you can charge them this time
no I was just like cool
I'll just do it for free
because like these people obviously don't have a lot
and they're obviously like really
really hungry to learn I'm
I'm a sucker for for teaching
so I went there and I did that
and I ran a couple of workshops and I got to know the
the people who were running the place
and I got to see what their education system was like
and it wasn't good enough
and so I ended up working there um
and eventually being their CTO
so I started off working part-time
and then ramped up and ramped
up and ramped up
and then I was just like part of the woodwork
so when I started working there was very um
it was very scrappy and I like scrappy but the
the syllabus itself that they were teaching wasn't it
it had big gaps in it it was like they'd have a
a couple of paragraphs to
to read about unit testing
it was like cool now you know unit testing
so
what I did was I built out some new programs for them
and I just kind of solidified the stuff that they had
and made it really really solid
and through doing that I learnt a lot about
about teaching and about brains and about like
how to teach the basics of Python and other languages
there was Javascript there as well and that was cool
and then CoVid happened haha
so um
we we were originally an on premises training provider
um
and we had about 250 students working in this converted
underground parking lot basically
we had this apartment building
and then there was a parking lot and like a
another parking lot with natural light
and we converted that into studios
um and so we had like all these students in there
and we helped them out with cheap accommodation
around the building as well
and then when Covid happened
we had to send everybody home
but we had to keep supporting them as well
so ended up building a whole lot of um
tooling to help with remote teaching
and it worked super super well
and again like
Learned a ton about just like
how to keep people motivated and connected remotely
yeah that's
that changed my life and trajectory
I think I can totally relate to that
I think I was also working at a boot camp school
right before Covid and then during Covid
and I also had like
a lot of lessons Learned already from my previous job
when we had a team in Berlin and a team in Hamburg
and we were trying to kind of work hybrid
which was always a mess and so I
I was like yeah
that thing where five people are in the room
and five people are at home
is not working out very well either
everybody's at home
yeah yeah
we didn't do hybrid do you think like
cause you said that like
the biggest change is that you give this workshop in uh
PyCon South Africa so do you think yeah
the community kind of changed your life in some way
oh yeah
yeah many times over
so there was that one that was very impactful
a couple of years later just like on a whim
I was like let's see if there are any
international conferences that I can maybe get to
and my first international conference was a Django con
US
I applied and I asked for a grant and I was just like
probably nothing will come of
this that I got to go and that's where I met um
a bunch of the Django Con Africa folks
and that was also impactful
and I met a lot of other people there that I
connected with quite well
and I'm like friends with
and they've supported me in a bunch of
the things that I've been doing
and I support and I support them where I can as well
meeting the Django Con Africa people was lovely
I I helped organise the first Django Con Africa
that was in Tanzania in Zanzibar
which is epic and um yeah
met some amazing people there again and it
it sort of snowballed from there
so now I speak at a lot of international conferences um
I've been asked to keynote
in all sorts of fancy places
which has been epic as well
and I've learnt a lot like
I've learnt about different
tools and technologies that have changed my opinion of
like
what is worth focusing on and what is worth teaching
and what I recommend to organizations
so that's been really good and impactful
and some of the connections
that I've made there as well have been good
so like networking like business networking
can sometimes feel
a little bit slimy in different ways but um
it's been a really good networking opportunity
so I go to these different conferences
and I try to talk to as many people as I can
and I try to add value and
I try to connect people with other people
and join different dots
and it's an experience every time
it's very stimulating and I learn a bunch every time
but some pretty good opportunities
have come out of it as well
so I would say that yeah
Python conferences have changed my life
it's been very very good
oh it's good to hear that cause um
I feel the same so yeah
that's great how did they change your life
well I mean
this is your podcast so
I would wait until I got to be
a guest in another podcast
OK I'll
I'll invite you to something haha
yeah
I think nobody knows Cheuk when they go to a conference
and everybody's like oh
who's Cheuk no yeah nobody yeah
so I like to always also ask something about
what do you do besides Python and teaching
and do you mean like uh
hobbies and fun stuff or I don't know
is it hobbies or is that another passion that you have
depends on the level of involvement
I guess yeah
so I do have different passions
um Python is a thing that takes up a lot of my time
teaching in general takes up a lot of my time
the non python stuff is soft skills
so I do train people in in different soft skills
so one of the products that I have at the moment is
it's for helping teams become better teams
um so basically what
I do is I go and um
like if there's a team that's
that's struggling to team in some way
then I will gather a bunch of information
and do a bunch of surveys
and talk to people in the team and their leadership
and figure out like
what's actually going wrong or
and what's going right as well
because often a lot of things are going right
they can be amplified um
often there's like weird
structural issues that have
strange pitfalls and side effects
that people aren't fully aware of
sometimes
there's some cultural differences within the team
there's like all sorts of weird
complicated things that happen
and then based on that I come up with
like a course
specifically for that team
that covers
different skills that they are likely to need
but it's not really like
you can't just tell a person how to be a good teammate
and then they go and be a good teammate
it doesn't work like that
because a lot of things are down to
habits and small changes
and that's not something you can just do once off
so these courses typically take a while
so I'm running a 12 week week course at the moment
and I'm not seeing everybody every week or every day
like I'm seeing them once every two weeks basically
like on average but then between that time
they are given different challenges and exercises
that help them to team better
and yeah it's
it's been really really good
so as of my other
a strong interest is organizational psychology
and just like how to be a good teammate
and do people follow through
so it's it's tricky
um a lot of people do
some people don't
whenever you run like training for a corporate
where your uh
where the training
participants have been told to be there
then like there will be resistance
especially if they've been told to be there
because it's like
you're going to be a better teammate now
ha ha like you need some soft skills
like people don't always receive that very well um
and so yeah
there's a couple of different ways to get buy in
and buying is so so important
like one of the biggest challenges
of adult education is motivation
and focus cause
there's so many different things that take our
attention and want our attention
and many of these things are very important and um
sometimes you just don't want to learn the thing
so
what I do is I try to make the training hyper relevant
so I find out from the individuals in the team
what they want what problems they see
what good they want to grow
and then I frame things in a way that shows them like
cool these things that you want
we're actually gonna cover that
and this thing that I was gonna cover
I can tweak it so it covers this other thing that that
you're interested in
and so that's part of it is just like
like actually being direct about like cool
I'm gonna give you what you want to some extent
to some reasonable extent
then the other thing is
showing people that by taking part in the training
they can actually support each other's growth
so sometimes you'll get people who show up who are like
yeah I don't need this
like I'm a great team player always
and I don't need this but those other guys need this
so for those people you can say cool
like your voice is actually really useful here
because you clearly know some stuff
you can help to direct this training
like you your input is going to be useful to the people
around you so that's helpful
so so far I haven't
so like with with the course I'm running at the moment
um there's about 30 people and they're very
very multicultural
and it's a very complicated team structure
if you're familiar with the team topologies book
so I read so I don't read a lot of programming books
but I read a lot of life business books and like
structure books
but Team Topologies is kind of a book about like
design patterns for organizing teams
in complicated organizations
and they've got a bunch of different um configurations
so like sometimes
you'll have a team that's focused on a specific project
or a specific like type of work um
and sometimes you'll have a team
that is actually distributed in different ways like um
you get this thing called an enabling team
and an enabling team
like they're kind of like a guild and they
they level up their skills
and they level up their tools
but then the individual members will go and
help other teams level up in the same way
so it's about enabling different projects so um
the team that I'm working with is something
like an enabling team
and something like a platform team
and so
it's just like a really weird structure to work in
so it's kind of like a data team right
yeah yeah
kind of like a data team kind of like
like if you imagine a big organization
that has lots of software projects
and then you have a security team just handle security
like imagine how they would need to work
like they
they can't go and fix all the problems themselves
but they can kind of build a
a paved road that other like project like
um product specific teams can
can walk along and they can go and share skills
and they can define like uh
maturity levels for different projects and just kind of
um put ownership of quality on other people
but still keep an eye on things and maintain that level
so so yeah
it's been it's been interesting
I just wanted to say that it's kind of the same
it reminds me of uh
when we were at work and we were always saying
we don't need a retrospective
this month or this two week
like this time you know
we have no problems you know
everything is fine
and then you do a retrospective and then it's like ah
one hour was not enough that's like yeah
to talk about all the things that
we have no problem with yeah
yes yeah
often I find that well
there's this exercise that I'm doing with
with this team in in particular
like we're we're talking about different concepts
and why they matter
like why psychological safety matters
why dependability matters
and how these things are related and things like that
but then an exercise that I do with people is um
Kaizen thing um
so Kaizen is a
like a Japanese business philosophy thing about um
making small changes and you can make
like tiny improvements to how you work
and those tiny improvements
even if they seem insignificant
they add up and they can do big things
so then people come up with their own
little improvements that they want to make
and they commit to it in a public way
and then they go and they do those things
and coupled with that I
I get folks to pay attention to each other
and try to notice the good things that are happening
so that they can say like
hey I saw you do this good thing
well done and that's been
really really cool so like
here's an example of a small kaizen
thing that a person can do
so one of the people in the team was like
every time I go to a stand up in the morning
I feel really anxious and then I
I go into the stand up and I just like
waffle and ramble and
and then I just feel bad it's like okay
how are we going to solve this
um we'll solve it by spending like
five to 10 minutes before the stand up
just thinking about what I'm gonna say
and it's like this really
really small thing that you can do
but then she goes to her stand up and she's prepared
she's not anxious um
she's more able to pay attention to the people
around her cause
because she's not caught up in her
internal anxiety loops and the rest of the team
get better clarity on her tasks and what she needs
and so they're more able to help her um
they're more able to focus on her stuff
and they're
more able to have space to talk about their stuff
so it's like this little
tiny thing with potentially a big impact
and there's loads of things like that
like lots and lots yeah
so I have a question for you
so if you have to choose right
you can either work with Python
the programming language or so either
or you can do both or people what
would you choose hi
so actually like so I love Python so much
but I think actually people
and the reason I say that is because in the end
like if you wanna build something big
it's a it's a team sport like if you're
if you're just working by yourself on something
like you can do some pretty epic things
but the
most impressive things are generally
done by teams of people
and getting people to team well is like
there's just so much to be unlocked
there's so much leverage to be added
people sometimes talk about 10 x developers
and stuff like that
it's very hard to make a 10 x developer
it's very hard to be a 10 x developer
it's very hard to find a 10 x developer
but you can take a team and make it
make it like a 10 x team
and it's not actually that bad to do like it's like
it's generally like it like
if you just look at it with the right lens
and get people to be motivated to make small changes
you can do some amazing things
and you don't necessarily need to stop at 10 x either
so that's part of it
and then the other part of it is like
LLMs are changing a lot of things
and they are adding a lot of leverage to programmers
and they are also they're changing the landscape in
in a lot of different ways
but people are getting to a point where
we're realizing what the uniquely human skills are
and if we can grow those human skills
then that's great so I think that there yeah
I think that there's a lot of space for just like
growing individual people in
in how they interact with one another
I think that's a good call
because I think a lot of developers
doesn't put that much emphasis on the people element
that can really help their career
but they just overlook it
they just thought like if
if I'm become quote unquote
the best developer I don't know how you quantified it
but like that I would be you know
I would do really well in my career
but I guess there are a lot of
people element in it that developers overlook
yeah I think that works up to a point
and then after that point
you are like you need to work with other people
um a metaphor I really like is soccer
um or football
depending on where you're from
your
individual skills as a soccer player really matter
quite a lot but most of the game of soccer
like if you watch people practice
like practice soccer
a lot of emphasis is placed on passing the ball really
really well and that means setting the person up for
the next person up for success
and that means
also being aware of what other people are doing
like you need that that context
and so that means paying
attention to things outside of your little bubble
but it also means just taking
care as you craft different things
so let's think about a pull request as a
as a ball passing moment like
how can you craft a pull request
to set the next person up for success
like make it clear and specific
and don't do a million different things at once
don't make it like a mega pull request
that's just gonna confuse people
if you make it super huge
then your whoever's reviewing it might um
they're a human they might lose focus
if you make it small so they can fit it in their brain
then they will do a better job
so like
there's all sorts of different ways to just like
make that one interaction better
another way you can pass a ball is like
asking a person for help
you can ask a person for help well or badly
and you can build up like you
you can build these skills
a lot of really good
like technically skilled developers
they'll hear about these teamwork good practices
and they'll nod and smile
and then just like make massive weird PRs anyway
because they
they don't necessarily value passing the ball well
and that's harms the people in their team
or it affects productivity
yeah I think it's not only I
I think sometimes um
what I noticed was not necessary that they don't
that people don't value passing the ball well
but it's actually it's hard
it's a lot it's a different work
it's different work to do that well
compared to just coding you know
a lot and like really making it bite size and what not
so that's kind of like it
I think it's more of a subconsciously
it's like learning a new skill and you want
you need to you need to
wanna learn to be in a space where you want to learn
so I guess it's like kind of like when you pass a ball
like I
I Learned it when I was like playing in the playground
right like when I was I was a very again
like I'm not really good at sports
I have no like sporty nerve in me
so I'm suck at like you know
even passing the ball right
mostly just like hit my head or I just miss it
and I have to chase after it right
so I was told how to like
really do the ball pass is to like
when you pass the ball
you have to make sure looking at the other person
make sure they are ready you are ready
and then you
you have to aim at giving the ball to them
rather than just whatever
float it so I think that's the difference right
like if you're just kind of float
it's like oh
you didn't catch it that's your fault
it's like no
but you didn't tell me that you're going to float at me
and then like of course I didn't get it
it hit hit my face and like whatever
right like
so you know that
you know actually
just passing a ball is different from just
randomly throwing a ball at people
so it's and also people always think oh
it's your fault that you didn't catch it
it's like but it no
it's your fault that you didn't pass it well
so yeah
yeah
like the ball metaphor for can be passed
can be pitched pretty far
because sometimes in a professional environment
people will take the ball
and then they'll put it down and walk away
like that could drop the ball right
ha ha
it's like somebody will do with this
ha ha ha also
there's people who collect balls
oh yes yes
oh collect more than they can handle right
like this is a handful it's just like
this is a beautiful football
and this is a beautiful ping pong ball
and it's like just you know
collecting them
yeah
or like doing tricks with the ball
and the goal's right there
it was like look at all the fancy stuff I can do
I can bounce it on my head
so we see this a lot yeah
and missed the point right
like oh
you have to put it in the goal
I guess
yeah I think
I think this is sometimes like
I think you can
be quite long time in a team without having
especially like
companies that are cutting on budget and everything
and I think uh
let's say 10 years ago
we were in a space where every team had a scrum master
an agile coach a
you know five people to help the teamwork
you know and now it's like
oh you gotta do it yourself again
so I think if you don't explicitly say things like
you know you are
responsible for your pull request to be approved
by the end of the sprint if we're doing sprints
you know then people are like
yeah yeah yeah
I think there is still a use in
scrum masters and things like that
but I think that people just put too much on them
the original thinking behind scrum masters
was that they would be scrum coaches
more than masters
it's not like they're there to tell everybody
what to do but they're there to be a coach
ideally get into a position
where people don't need them so much
but it didn't really go that way
it ended up
yeah things get yeah
I think why people hate like
agile scrum is that
because company thought that that's like a
you know solve all the problem
like ticket to solve all the problem
but it's not so that's why like
it's got me misused and people ended up hating them
yeah yeah
got misused a lot um
and we see that like at all implemented badly in
in lots of different places where they're like cool
we're gonna have sprints
let's have a plan for the next 10 sprints
what specifically are we going to do
in the next 10 sprints
and it's sprinting
that means we're moving really quickly
but yeah but why and where are we going
don't know OK
just run OK
as long as you have the ball haha
yeah man haha
just to come back to um
the thing you're doing at prelude right
you mentioned at the beginning that you're also doing
um mentorship for teachers
so not just yeah
so you're going to the meta level a bit
with the teaching yeah yeah
so that's actually with um
the Guild of educators so it's a community I started um
last year and I've been like
so there is a craft to teaching well
and a lot of people who want to teach code
they have the coding skill
but not necessarily the experience in teaching
and they'll often mimic what they've already seen so um
traditional education systems
where you have a sage on the stage and
and all of that so that's one aspect of it um
our understanding of what good teaching looks like
has changed the way people learn and study
and like
that is something that has been well studied there
there is science to back up
modern methods that many people just don't know about
standard schooling where you get
everybody to move at the same pace
under serves most people and like it's
it's not like it's all bad
I mean look how many people can read
that's great but it
it can definitely be better
so
part of it is about just giving good teaching skills
and like mental frameworks to people who want to teach
and giving teachers support structures as well
like a lot of people get out of teaching
because they get frustrated in different ways
like I think the half life for teachers in the UK is
7 years I stand to be corrected
but I mean that's not long enough
if we could make that half life longer
that would be really nice
so supporting teachers is a big thing
but then there's also um
there are teachers who are teaching technical stuff
who aren't necessarily practitioners
of that technical stuff
so earlier we spoke about PyCon Namibia
and PyCon Namibia is really
really great
because we get to go and hang out with students
and show them cool things with code
and we had this day where we were at a
like a local school
and we were doing some python with the kids
and a bunch of computer studies
teachers were there as well
and these teachers were like they were lovely
they showed up they were hungry to learn
they really wanted to help in lots of different ways
but when you interacted with them
you could see like
like they don't know that much Python
they don't know
that much about the thing that they're there to teach
because they just don't have the experience
and so my thinking was that if we hear those folks up
with technical practitioners
with developers and to say like cool
now you have an expert that you can speak to
then that'll probably affect quite a lot of lives
cause one 1 teacher affects many
many people and so
the idea with the mentorship program
is that it's a completely voluntary thing
um it's not like I'm mentoring people
and they're paying me or anything like that
it's um
mentors can show up or potential mentors can show up
and volunteer mentees can
can show up and say like hey
I need help and then they get matched together
so a mentee can be there
because they want to learn technical skills
or because they want to learn teaching skills
and a mentor can also help with either of those things
and a mentor can be a mentee at the same time
that's okay now structurally
like a lot of people get a little bit frightened
of becoming a mentor because it's like
oh if I'm somebody's mentor
it's like this lifetime commitment
and they're going to expect
hours from me every single day
yeah so um
there's a lot that's in place to make it like
safe for the mentors in terms of their
their own capacity so we'll
do like a matchmaking thing
and a mentor and mentee will be matched together
for 12 weeks that's three months
and at the end of that 12 week period
it's like it's done they can join again if they want to
during those 12 weeks they're expected to meet
once every two weeks for like an hour
and so it's not a big time commitment
that's the minimum commitment
if both the people want to meet
want to spend more time together
that's great but it's like that is all that is required
and then the other thing is that
the burden of organizing things goes on to the mentee
not the mentor so the mentee will say like cool
we we need to meet up let's schedule something
so so they'll they'll be the scheduler
and they also need to
prep the mentor before their session
just by saying like
this is roughly what I think we should talk about
and so the mentor doesn't go in blind
they can mentally prepare
so I've run a similar structure before
um a similar mentorship structure before
when I was working at that non profit coding bootcamp
where I had professional developers mentoring our
our baby developers and that was really lovely
so we match people up
and the 12 weeks finished and all of that
and basically every single mentor
said that they'd like to be included in the next round
so it was a good experience
so I'm just taking the learnings from there
and applying it to a slightly different domain
so get people to teach well
teach Python well specifically and um
there are some like interesting side effects as well
so the Guild of educators has a discord server
and there'll be a channel on there for the mentors
and so the mentors can can swap notes with each other
they can say like oh
this weird thing happened
how do we solve it or my uh
my mentee is asking about this thing
I don't know about it does anybody know about it
so they've got people to lean on and talk to
and I think
some really good things can come out of those
conversations and for me it would be really
really interesting to see what problems people have
and how they're solving them
that's a resource on its own okay
so now come the million dollar question
how can someone join the Guild of educators
so head to Guild of educators.org
you can join just as a regular member
there's a join us button um
so you can join the
the discord server there and you can uh
fill out a form there and give me your email address
and then you'll get emailed
about different news and things
when it happens
and then if you want to join the mentorship program
there's a different form to fill out
on a different tab yeah
so just go to Guild of educators.org I
hope we put it somewhere
like in the description or on the screen
I don't know we'll
we'll see but yeah
we'll get folks the information
coming back to the beginning
where we talked about PyCon um
Africa Africa
you showed us what your colleague did as a copy
as inspired by PyCon US
and I thought that is like really cool
and maybe you wanna show that awesome
so at Python US and other conferences
you get a name tag
and then there are stickers and ribbons
that you can attach to the name tag
in order to say who you are
to say like I'm a community member and I like hugs
and I'm involved with PyLadies and
and things like that so
one of the organizers of PyCon
Africa is really into 3d printing
it's amazing and he made these name tags
so this is completely modular
you can take it apart it's got these like
little purple things to hold everything together
and it just pop out oh
that's really cool yeah
and if you zoom in on this
like this is the PyCon Africa logo
this was done with a 3D printer
and when you print these things
it's a really interesting process
because you need to take um
the transparency of the different colors into account
and you can get the 3D printer to kind of
mix the colors yeah
it's super cool
so we have these like epic name badges and yeah
like
it comes with a little lanyard that you can click in
and you can say that you you like hugs
I like hugs so this is yeah
this is the process can we have one
like this excuse about anything before coffee
ha ha
so this is cool
it's gonna be a little keepsake for everyone as well
this is the park on South Africa over there um
that's our national I want that now okay
ha ha ha yeah
because at last PyCon in Germany
Cheuk actually just made a really quickly
a website to like really quickly
like what else do you do during a conference where she
she was like rating swag people could rate the swag no
you did that Cheuk yeah
that that's
that's more than a swag that's the name patch
it's so cool yeah
that is yeah exactly
so that's like so I
I need I need another session for that
so
so now Cheuk needs to come to PyCon Africa
see that's what you had to
what you had to start with
and then you get everybody to attend
I think this is going to become a PyCon
South Africa staple I think
it's gonna be our standard thing, because it actually like
like it takes a while to print the stuff
but we looked at the price of like
ordering name badges and things like this
and it's actually comparable
it's like um
it's pretty close and this is only
this is like the first prototype
the printing has become more efficient
so yeah it's
it's actually a really good way to go
and it's unique and like
I think that's the charm of like
you have stuff that you made yourself
so two years ago at Python Pizza in Hamburg
we did the Python Python logo shaped cookie cutters
also with the oh yeah
I I really want that one as well
ha ha ha that's awesome
can you do it again and then I will come
I think that's really the end
so um
we have very very
you know limited amount of time
we can talk for it for ages
but I guess like seeing Sheena travels a lot
we can you know
next time you see her you can just
you know come chat in South Africa
South Africa as well yeah
and um yeah
so thank you very much for listening
to everybody who's listening
bye bye thank you
yeah