Ali: [00:00:00] You have a unique perspective, no matter what your perspective is, whether it’s that you like Britney Spears and a lot of people don’t.
Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and optimize your team or organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your host, Matt Stratton, and I’m here at All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before we go into the content though, let’s have a word from our sponsors. The worst thing about the Arrested DevOps podcast is when it ends. You’re left wondering what to do next. What are you going to listen to on your commute home? How do you occupy your time when walking the dog? What are you going to listen to during the quarterly all-hands meeting? But fear not, dear listener, there is a solution. You need to subscribe to Software Defined Talk right now. It’s a weekly podcast that recaps all the news in cloud computing, DevOps, and enterprise software. The hosts, Cote, Matt Ray, and Brandon Wichard, will keep you up to date on all things cloud while offering tips on how to optimize your Costco haul and how to PowerPoint. It’s a fun, free-flowing conversation that will keep you entertained and informed. What are you waiting for? Subscribe to the podcast today by visiting softwaredefinedtalk.com or by searching for Software Defined Talk in your favorite podcast app.
[00:01:28] So yeah, as I said, I’m at this great conference called All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is my first time at All Things Open. I’m very excited about it. The conference actually starts tomorrow, but joining me today is one of the speakers, Allie Spittel. So Allie, can you introduce yourself to our audience? Tell us a little bit about what you do.
Ali: Totally. So I am Allie. I am originally a software engineer, but I’ve transitioned into teaching code. So I am at General Assembly, which is a coding bootcamp. Where I’m an instructional lead, distinguished faculty member. So I get to teach 30 people roughly at a time from zero to being a professional software engineer. And it is the coolest job in the world. And on top of that, I have found that content creation, so blogging and podcasting and all that, has been a really great format for teaching as well. It reaches a bigger audience than I can reach in a classroom.
Matty: That’s great. What are— and I want to dig into that because I’m really interested in thinking about how we can use things like writing and blogging to teach and also to learn. Before we get into that a little bit though, because I think it applies, what’s the content? What’s the workshops and talks and stuff that you’re giving here at ATO? Not to confuse you, you’re on the podcast ADO and we are at ATO, so let’s really get confused.
Ali: [00:02:49] That is confusing. Lots of letters. So, I am speaking on 2 things. I’m doing a workshop tomorrow on blogging in order to gain visibility for open source software. So, specifically, if you are writing code for this thing, it’s incredible, but then how do you get it in front of people? And I think that content creation and writing awesome documentation is a great way to do that. So, my first talk tomorrow is a big workshop on that. And then my second talk is about teaching code. Because that’s one of my big passions in life and a little bit different than a lot of people think. And I know that it sounds like a really specific topic, like, that’s not gonna appeal to too many people, but it really does. Because if you’re mentoring anybody, working with a junior developer, even if teaching yourself, like, all of these things apply. And even wider than that, if you’re doing conference talks or speaking at meetups or writing blog posts, teaching principles and the concepts that make you an awesome teacher will make you really great at that. So those are my 2 talks that I’m giving. Here.
Matty: [00:03:51] Great. Now, I want to go back to that. So, like, we talk about, and I want to dig in in a little while about why podcasting and blogging and stuff makes you a better teacher. Why, if that’s not my job, like, what are maybe some of the peripheral effects of getting good at teaching even if all I really want to do is sling code?
Ali: So many things. So, first off, if you’re trying to get further in your development career, like, at some point, you are going to probably be mentoring some other developer or leading a team or maybe even transitioning into management. And so knowing how to onboard people onto your product or how to facilitate their learning of a new skill or even just helping them fix a bug so that they’re not just learning how to fix that bug, they’re learning more than that and they’re learning concepts that they can apply further on from that. That is so helpful and something that will go pretty far. So I definitely think that teaching helps you become a better programmer as well, because if you’re teaching something, you have to know it really, really, really well. I learned that the first time I was teaching. It’s like people will ask you these questions that you would never think of in a million years, just because different people think in different ways. And so you have to know these topics in so many different ways, so from so many different angles, all these little details. And if you can teach something well, you really know it. It’s something that you’re really solid in your knowledge about. So it’s really helpful from that perspective as well. And then the third thing that I always talk about is that if you want to build a platform outside of your work and build like a personal brand, which I don’t know how I feel about that word.
Matty: [00:05:37] There’s certain terms that it’s like we all agree they’re terrible, but then someone’s like, what should I use instead? And you’re like, uh, I run into this with thought leader. I go to my boss all the time. I’m like, stop saying thought leader. He’s like, great. Or I say, stop saying thought leadership. And he’s like, great. What should I say instead? I’m like, I don’t know, just not that. And he’s like, yeah, come back to me with a solution. Until then, I’m gonna keep saying— I’m like, fair, fair enough.
Ali: So if you want to be a thought leader or build your personal brand, then a lot of teaching principles come in there as well, because doing things like blogging, content creation, even like helping people with Stack Overflow questions, having somewhat of a teaching background can help with all that.
Matty: And I think we were just like having some fun, like poking fun at those terms. But the thing is, a lot of what people don’t like, if you look at what people don’t like about people who self-identify as thought leaders or who, where that’s a big thing, a lot of it is those are never gonna be folks who are actually good at teaching and sharing, right? So the people that are actually really effective in that space are great teachers. And even if it’s not like they’re sitting and doing a workshop on like the best way to like write this testing framework, no matter what it is that you’re trying to share, you have to learn how to teach. And that’s a really specific thing. Even if what you’re teaching are really broad strokes around cultural change in an organization or transformations or how to do better work, it’s still all an education thing, right?
Ali: [00:07:05] Totally. Totally. I think so. I took a bunch of education classes in college. If I hadn’t left college early to be a software engineer, I would’ve been an education minor. And so I think I gained so much more from those classes than I did my computer science classes, from any other classes that I took in college, because, um, all those teaching skills go so far beyond, beyond a classroom. And I do get to use my skills within a classroom, but even when I was just a normal software engineer, I was helping out the junior developers who were being onboarded and the interns and helping them become better software engineers as well, because that’s going to make my job easier.
Matty: I think it’s really true when you talked about you say, you know, when you teach something, and I know it just even through the process of teaching, it activates different neural pathways in our brain than actually doing the thing. And part of my job when I was at Chef was I taught a lot of Chef Fundamentals workshops. That was just part of my remit, like in my job was I would go to customers and I would teach a 2-day class over and over and over again. And I’d been using Chef for a really long time before then. And the first thing that was great was by going through functionally learning how to teach it, I was like, here’s whole things about this product that I didn’t even know I know it did. And now I want to go back in time and go slap myself and say, no dummy, look at how you should have been doing this. That’s a different problem. But part of it too was just like I knew the primitives so much better because it’s a kind of a combination, I think, of number one, it’s the repetition. But even if you’re not going to repeat it a lot, you have to— there’s a lot of stuff I think we do without having to really think about the why. And that’s okay. Sometimes all you need to do is just get shit done and that’s fine. Right. But when you’re explaining, when you’re teaching somebody, if you want it to resonate, even if they aren’t going to remember the why. And that’s the thing that I found was a lot of the stuff when I was teaching it was, I’m sure when you looked at what retention was afterwards, all I really wanted them to retain and be, if I was going to say, what did you learn? I didn’t really care if they would come back and say, I learned this is why this matters, but I learned this is how to write this resource. But the process stuff sticks more when you have kind of some of the background behind it, I think. So what’s been your experience with that?
Ali: [00:09:20] 100%. So I think that one of the most important concepts of teaching is linking. And so what linking is, is you’re taking what somebody already knows and the real world around them, and then linking that to some new piece of knowledge. Cuz if you’re teaching something in isolation, it is impossible to learn because you’re learning this thing in, uh, total isolation. There’s no context being given. You’re not applying it to anything that you already have a foundation in. And so if you’re extending what you already know instead of learning something totally new, it’s way easier. That’s why, like, learning your first programming language is so much harder than learning your second programming language. And so I think that this totally ties in, and giving, like, the framing and the why and building that into lessons and building that into any teaching moment is so, so, so important.
Matty: I would think that to be able to do that linking, it’s more challenging to do. I hate to say it’s scale, but across, but to do broadly, right? So like if you and I are saying that you’re going to sit down and teach me how to do a thing, you can ask a bunch of questions and understand where I’m coming from. You can understand my frame, you know, my frame of reference, my background, the things that matter to me and be able to kind of build that linking. But then if you’re trying to either build something that’s repeatable, you’re building a course, that’s going to be consumed not with you interactively, or we were just talking about offline about you’re doing a workshop in a very big room with potentially hundreds upon hundreds of people in there. I’m also interested to see how do you achieve that? Granted, it’s going to be different. This is why people pay more money for a private tutor in anything than you do for something else. Of course. I think you can still try to— how do you do that? Like, what are some tips?
Ali: [00:11:03] Yes, so I think one thing is subtly reteaching things a bunch of times and disguising that you’re reteaching something. So you can do that by using different learning styles. So you can have diagrams and then also have like videos that you’re showing and then also do a code-along, but then also have a traditional lecture type format. And so if you are switching that up, then it gives you more leeway to teach things a bunch of times. And then another thing is to use different examples that are gonna appeal to different people. And different learners. So that’s something that I’m really passionate about is that like a lot of times when you see coding stuff, you’ll see the Star Wars tutorials and all that. And that’s awesome for a subset of people. But like my students freak out when I do Britney Spears fans apps. Like they just love that. And so teaching with different things for different people is super important. But to go back to linking, one thing that I always teach is when I am teaching the concepts of variables and functions, I always link it back to algebra class. Because that tie gets broken a lot of times when you see these coding tutorials. But when you reference that explicitly and tell them, you’ve seen variables before, it may have been in 7th grade, but you have seen this before, I know that. That tends to light up a light bulb for some people. And that won’t be the only way that I would teach it, but one way that I teach it so that for some people that really resonates and they’re like, oh yeah, I can do this thing. I’ve been doing this thing since I was 11.
Matty: [00:12:32] I wonder too, so as a learner, one thing that maybe we can think about too is that we think, first of all, we think we know more than we do, right? And so there can be things that as we’re watching a lesson or a workshop where we’re like, oh, I totally get this, I can skip to the next thing. I get that. I get, especially the stuff that we would want to skip is going to be all of that foundational understanding. You’re like, I understand how variables work. I don’t have to watch this. And you’re like, do you? Yeah, you know, like, and so I used to, um, back in the day, used to do a bunch of swing dancing, and we used to have a saying which was that beginner dancers take intermediate classes, intermediate dancers take advanced classes, and advanced dancers take beginner classes, right? So you can always go back to those, those first principles and to those primitives. So I think, and especially for those of us who are coming into the industry kind of orthogonally, right, like where we didn’t do our undergrad in CS and do whatever. So, we’re learning as we go. We think we know, again, way more than we do. And I remember watching, like, when I was learning Go, I was like, okay. So, I sort of— I’m a terrible software engineer in the first place, right? Because, again, I learned by just doing things and making things work. It’s also why I’m terrible at Photoshop. Like, someone who knows what they’re doing watches me and they’re like, you know that thing you just did? Like, there’s a button and it’ll do it way better, right? Because we learn as we go. So, but then we can get to this point when we think we know all this stuff because we don’t actually even know that there was more of that core of that link because we’re like, I get it because I knew how it was in practice. So I think it could help us to, to maybe— and, and I think that goes into both as a consumer and then also as a content developer because maybe when you’re creating content, you’re like, oh, I— everybody knows this. I don’t have to go back to this first principle because if somebody’s taking a tutorial on React, then I assume they know how variables work. And you’re like, but maybe your spin is going to open eyes differently. And, you know, I’m not saying, again, if you’re gonna have like half an hour on the theory of variables, like, well, maybe that’s a bit much.
Ali: [00:14:37] Yeah.
Matty: But maybe a little something is still— your time is valuable, but it’s not that valuable. You know, you can watch, you can watch a minute and a half about it. Right. Yeah.
Ali: So much there for sure. I was mostly self-taught as well. Like I took a couple computer science classes in college, but Um, wasn’t at all a CS major, came into it late and had no idea what programming was, like all that. And so for me, when I was teaching at a boot camp for the first time, I’d been a software engineer for years, but I was like, oh my goodness, I am relearning all these things from the ground up, especially JavaScript. Like, I jumped mostly into front-end frameworks from the beginning, like straight into React, and I was like Oh my goodness, if I had stepped back and learned all this beforehand, it would have been so much easier to learn all this React stuff and all the foundational pieces that I thought were in React that were really just JavaScript things and all that. And so I, I really think that there is a lot to be said there. And then also for content creation, like, everybody’s going to come at things from a different angle. Like, you have a unique perspective no matter what your perspective is, whether it’s that you like Britney Spears and a lot of people don’t, or you are a very visual learner, or you’re not a visual learner. You have a unique perspective on these things, and so it can be terrifying to put this content out into the world because you’re like, somebody’s already done this before. I wrote a React tutorial like a year and a half ago, which is way after the initial burst of React tutorials. I was like, nobody’s gonna read this. They’re gonna think I’m just annoying that I’m putting another one of these out in the world. It’s my most read blog post of all time because you just come at it from a different angle than other people have, and that’s still adding something to the conversation even if somebody’s done it before.
Matty: [00:16:25] And yeah, having that pragmatic approach, which is this is someone who— because I think again with a lot of especially newer things, and again when something new is coming, the people who are initially going to jump on and write all the documentation, the tutorials, are people that have been doing this work for a long time. Right? So, they’re like, which is great because those are the people who are able to absorb it when all there is is the foundational docs, right? Like, so, when Go was a new thing, like, yes, a pragmatic person like me, like, there’s no way I could, you know, you have to start with that. But then what I found as a user when I learn stuff, the most valuable, I get a lot of value out of the, like, okay, I’m gonna sit down and watch a course. But also, I’m like, okay, where’s the blog on someone solving a problem? ’Cause you know what? A to-do list does not help me because I’m not writing a to-do list, right? I wanna see the person that’s trying to do this thing. And it’s even more awesome when I’m like someone who came from my background, which is like, I’m a system engineer that’s learning how to do this. I don’t really understand how this particular thing works, but here’s some pragmatic stuff. You know, and the problem with that is you can, you know, maybe I can understand you can go down some maybe not great practices, you know, but sometimes all you have to do is get a thing done. And that at least helps you say, You can also— it’s like that time to first delight, right? You get something effective done quickly, you get that dopamine hit of like, I did a thing, it did mostly what I asked it to do, great, I’m going to continue. But if I have to go a long time before I, I see any result that’s anywhere close to the thing I’m actually trying to accomplish, yeah, and you’re like, okay, this again, it’s not helpful. Okay, I wrote it, I just spent 3 hours learning how to write a to-do list. I don’t— I’m a system engineer. I literally will never do this or anything close to it, right? So, um, I’m chuckling too when you talked about, you know, you sort of throw these blog posts out there and then they become your most popular content. So years ago— and by the way, any recruiter listening, the fact that I say I’ve worked with SharePoint does not mean I want a SharePoint job. So I’ve tried everything I can to expunge all reference to SharePoint and my name from the whole internet. But, but I did used to manage SharePoint, and I had this problem years and years ago that I managed to figure out, and I sort of just threw it on my blog primarily as self-documentation and also maybe useful for my team. Because I was like, it was one of those things where we didn’t really have like a good place internally to store random docs like this. So I was like, you know what, I’ll put it on my blog and then I can email that link to the other people on my team and then we have it. And then it got picked up as an answer on MSDN forums, and for years I was getting thousands of views of this thing every day. And I’m like, really? This is what you know me for? But because it was a practical problem and I was like, this is just what I did. So the other thing is, again, it could be like, put some of— I think take some of the pressure off yourself with the content you create, which you don’t have to write something that’s going to go viral and is going to be the number one upvoted answer on Stack Overflow. Sometimes just write it to have it. And if nobody but you ever looks at it, like there are frankly blog posts I’ve written where the audience is intentionally 100% future Matt, right? Where I’m just like, I want to have a thing to go back at and look at later. And if nobody ever reads it but me, totally great. Right.
Ali: [00:19:45] You know, so much of that. I have another talk that I’m not giving here, but it’s called Yes, You Should Write That Blog Post. And the whole thesis thesis of it is I write for 3 people. My past self, the girl who felt like she didn’t fit in a computer science classroom and who I wanted to write blog posts that appealed to me and who fit who I was instead of, you know, the average programmer. The present me, because I am trying to learn new things and I’m trying to document that and write it down, and teaching things helps cement it in my mind. And then, um, the future me. So for my career, and then also for when I’m trying to solve my own problem down in the future. Like, I have a blog post that I wrote forever ago about how to fill out calls for papers for conferences, and every year when I’m doing CFPs, I go back to that blog post and I’m like, oh, okay, this is what I do. Um, thank you, past me.
Matty: I have one of my more popular posts on— and do we call it DevTo? DevTo? How do you say it out loud, by the way?
Ali: [00:20:48] DevTo. Or Dev I think that it’s kind of all over the place, right?
Matty: Okay, so it’s been on how to get this one particular Powerline font to work on a Mac in Visual Studio Code. And again, it was one of those because I wrestled with it forever, it was super annoying, and I’m like, yeah. So again, I sort of wrote it for other people but also for me because I’m like, you know what, I’m going to rebuild my machine again at some point, this is going to happen. And again, and everyone’s like, thank you, I’ve been trying. I’m like, I didn’t even— because it, it was, it’s So again, back to having that unique perspective, you can think you have the most corner case in the world. The internet has proved to us that there are literally thousands of other people with this exact same really weird problem that you would imagine nobody but you would ever hit. Oh, definitely.
Ali: Definitely. I have a blog post about how I set up computers from the beginning. So it’s like, you know, install iTerm, install VS Code, and it’s like nobody wants to read that. Well, turns out they do.
Matty: The, that’s the other thing. So if you also want to get into content creation, so like lists are just easy. People love them some lists, right? There’s a reason BuzzFeed exists. Oh, totally.
Ali: [00:21:52] And the thing with them is, is that they’re skimmable. So something that I really emphasize with content creation is that skimmable stuff works because people don’t want to read an essay. You can write an essay. That’s totally fine. Love it. You do you. But most people want to read something that they can look down the page, look at the images, look at the headers, look at the listicles. All of that, that’s going to make them want to actually dive in and read your post because it’s quicker to read, it’s easier to read, it’s less overhead from them, and it’s easier to come back to as a resource as well in the future.
Matty: Then that can be the introduction to your bigger, deeper thoughts of things that might come up because then they’re like, oh, well, as long as I was over here looking for your top 10 Visual Studio Code extensions, they’re like, oh, I can also see you have this post about digital transformation, about thinking about this. That sounds like an interesting thing. Yeah. Again, it’s also why practical— again, when we think about talks too. So I think that there’s a lot of value in talks that are around why. But the reason people always ask for more how. And I think the right thing is doing a little bit of both, right? When you think about that, because I also kind of talk about it as the eat your vegetables talks. And this is like one of the reasons I love Singletrack. It means, like, you want to sit and you want to see that Kubernetes talk, you got to sit through the testing talk. You got to eat your vegetables, right? But you can do that in your content too, which can be like, okay, so I have this one, you know, you’re coming here for, like, my 10 weird tricks of, like, how to better, you know, test React, but you’re gonna learn some other stuff along the way, you know. So it’s a little that you can kind of get into that model, I think. And you can do that in your writing, you can do that in your speaking too. Because again, it’s sort of a little bit of a Trojan horse, right? Which is like, okay, I’m tricking you a little bit. You think you’re gonna come hear really interesting engineering stuff and you will, but you’re gonna eat some vegetables too. Totally. You know, and I think that can be really helpful.
Ali: [00:23:50] Agreed. Agreed. And going back to the why question.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: I think that’s like the biggest thing that you can do in your talks is get people excited about something, get them wanting to learn more afterwards because for better or for worse, conference talks are not the best format for education because people are not, doing hands-on stuff other than if you get a workshop slot. And so instead it’s mostly like a lecture-type format where there’s a person speaking in front of the room, and that’s not really how people engage with the material and actually learn it. So the best thing that you can do in your conference talk is to get people excited about it so that they’ll actually learn it for real outside of your conference talk.
Matty: And again, it’s interesting because like you said, it’s incredibly ineffective to teach that way, but if you ask conference attendees, they will invariably tell you that’s exactly what they want. Yeah, but I think it also goes back to that, you know, Henry Ford thing, which was the, if I ask my customers what they want, they would tell me they want a faster horse, right? So as a conference organizer, I’m like, you think you know what you want, but you don’t know what you need, right? What’s the Batman thing, right? It’s the hero we deserve, not the one there we need, not the one we deserve. So we’ll give you what you need, not necessarily what you asked for, but being able to illustrate with practical examples. So I think that’s kind of— and I really do believe that when people give feedback to an event, when they’re like, there wasn’t enough technical What they’re really trying to say, and they just don’t know the right words, was to say, I wasn’t seeing practical examples. And they didn’t know how to put that into words. And so being able to do that where it’s not like I’m going to watch this talk and I’m going to understand the strangler pattern specifically because I’m going to see how to type that in, or I’m going to understand how to use this particular function, because I’m not. Because you’re right. Because I didn’t actually do the muscle memory. It’s giving me an illustration, right? And I think that’s always one of the things that was challenging with me when I was doing a lot more talks that I would consider more technical, and they would always go back to Chef because Chef is what I knew. But then I’d always kind of sit there and say, like, this is not a talk about Chef. We’re talking about infra code. You know, you can do this with Puppet, you can do this with Ansible, whatever. I don’t know how to tell you the function to use and the name of the thing, but Here’s a— it’s not just a concept, right? Here’s some— an actual implementation that is another way for some people, depending upon how they learn, like for some people that is going to help them. So if we skip that stuff, we’re doing a disservice to the people who will learn by seeing that practical application.
Ali: [00:26:14] Totally. It’s so important to tell your stories and like why this is actually important. Why have you used this in your past? What you want to use it for in the future? All those things are so important and a huge part of talks. As well.
Matty: So what are some of the things when people are doing right? So we sort of talked about like, you know what, just sort of get it out there, whatever. Your story is great. You’re important. You’re a special person. That’s great. That’s still true. Okay. So how can we get better at it? So like, what are some of the things to make the content— now, if we want to say we want to go beyond just dumping it into a text editor so that it exists, and you started to talk about a few of these things, but like, yeah, what are some tips, some practical applications of writing better content?
Ali: Totally. Well, so I think the skimmable thing that we just talked about is huge. And then also the why, I like to call the why the framing. It’s just like the—
Matty: can we, I was just thinking like, cuz there’s 2 different things, cuz you talked about something we haven’t touched on yet. Um, which was also using this stuff for building projects and building awareness. So like let’s frame these into 2 different applications, right? So the, the building your brand stuff. Okay, cool. And then thinking, and then I want to, I really want to talk about practical advice and ways to use this writing to bring knowledge to my open source project. But first let’s talk about bringing awareness to you, the person who’s so smart and everybody needs to know.
Ali: [00:27:35] Yeah. And I think that both of them are kind of hand in hand. Like both the strategies for getting your stuff in front of people is like the same as getting your project in front of people. I think in a lot of ways, but we could totally talk about the 2 contrasting ways as well. But for writing great content, I think the first thing is adding the why in there. Like, why is this important? What problem does this solve? Why should you be using it? Unless it’s something that is just a very specific issue that you’re solving and people are searching for that specific problem, maybe they already know the why in that situation.
Matty: The why is because computers are terrible.
Ali: But if it’s something like a beginner’s guide to React or something like that, like, why should they be writing React? Why is it important? What problem is it gonna help them solve? So that is great for your introduction. And then from there, making it skimmable. So having different subheaders, having images in there, having colorful things, all of that is going to catch people’s eyes, keep them engaged. They’re not going to just be looking at black text on a white background and getting super bored of that. And then from there, I think trying to appeal to multiple learning styles is really important. So adding code demos in there so people can break your code and also add to it and all of that. That is super helpful for a lot of people. Adding graphics so that they can see visual representations of what you’re talking about and exploring different types of content creation as well. We talk a lot about blogging and I think that’s the most accessible on-ramp, but there’s so many other ways as well, like podcasting. We’re on a podcast right now. Video making, all of those things. There’s different ways to speak to to different people and different ways of creating content that will appeal to you as a content creator as well, or speaking in front of a conference as well.
Matty: [00:29:26] As Brian Berry, who was one of the founders of the Ship Show back in the day, has a great comment which I love. So this is the dirty secret, dirty little secret, unknown secret of tech podcasting, which is this is how you get people to spend an hour talking to you that normally you would not get an hour of just their time. And somebody had a tweet recently that was also the reason that people start podcasts is so their friends will talk to them. Because it’s one of those things where you’re like, hey, let’s get together and go grab coffee. You’re like, I’m busy, I got this lesson, I got this thing, whatever. You wanna come on my podcast? Yes, let’s do it. So that could be a trick.
Ali: Made so many friends through that. Yeah, for sure. And so I think that those are the more practical pieces of advice for making solid content. But then there’s the other side of how do I get people to actually read this content? And so that’s a big hurdle for people that are just starting out for sure. So I think that there are 2 main segments to this at this point. The first one is social media. The second is search engine optimization. So with social media, a lot of it’s just consistency and posting a lot on there and also making it so that you’re a real person because people are going to keep coming back to you if they like you as a real person instead of just this text that they’re reading. Make yourself more than just a picture on a screen to people.
Matty: [00:30:42] And I think that doesn’t mean that you have to like share everything about yourself. You can still keep yourself protected, but just even enough of just doing some engaging. So like if your Twitter account is just that you’re spewing out links to your blog through If This Then That or Sprout or something like that, no, I’m like, I can subscribe to your blog other ways, right? I don’t need to, you know, but even if it’s something where like you, you post about a thing And it’s kind of your take, right? Like even if the entire reason you have Twitter is just to promote your blog, totally cool. But like something where you’re like, hey, I just wrote this post about blah. I thought it was cool because I talk about ferrets, you know, or something like that. And then someone might be like, okay, I’m going to read that. And then they might reply to your tweet and say— and it doesn’t mean you have to engage with everybody who engages with you. There’s a lot of assholes on the internet. You don’t need me to tell you that. But so there’s a bit— and I think that’s sort of the thing. Like, and all of this stuff, you know, watch out for the generalizations, which is saying when we say engage, it doesn’t mean you have to talk to everybody. You don’t owe anybody, you don’t owe anybody a conversation.
Ali: [00:31:44] Yeah.
Matty: But you, but if you wanna be successful, have some conversations.
Ali: Yeah. You know, it’s a great way to make like genuine friendships as well. So many people that I’ve become friends with in the past couple years have been through talking on social media or at conferences or something along those lines. So it’s great from that perspective too. I wanna flag the assholes comment.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: Can you come back to that?
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: That’s the biggest question I always get asked in these types of workshops is how to handle that. But then the other piece of it, instead of social media and social media for developers, I would highly recommend like Twitter is probably the biggest one. There’s like a sub-community in Instagram, but it’s hard to grow for sure.
Matty: And you all think that LinkedIn is just for the suits and it’s below you and everything. You will get a lot of engagement on LinkedIn in places you wouldn’t think about. Yeah. Now you might not want it, maybe. But I always, I, I have found, especially because it’s, it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of junk, but like, you know, LinkedIn is okay. It’s not just Facebook for work, right?
Ali: You know, totally, totally.
Matty: A lot of content gets shared there that we don’t think about.
Ali: Yeah, very true. And stuff lives longer on there too.
Matty: [00:32:46] Yeah.
Ali: Like the life of social media is really interesting if that’s something that you’re interested in.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: Like LinkedIn posts live a lot longer than tweets.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: So then the other side of it is search engine optimization. When you’re starting out with that, adding keywords to your blog post. Don’t keyword stuff though. Keyword stuff would be like putting DevOps chef, every single DevOps term.
Matty: Like having a whole paragraph at the end that’s just a bunch of words in gray text on white. You think you’re going to fool Google. They’re smarter than you. They’re on to you. Yeah, don’t do that.
Ali: Nobody wants to read that. But if you identify a couple keywords that people are going to search and land on your article, that’s a great strategy. Then there’s also backlinking. So what that is, is getting other blogs to link to your blogs. Do not go out and email a bajillion people asking them to link to your stuff. It’s awful. Backlink spamming is like a very real thing. So annoying. But that being said, if you are friends with people with blogs or you make relationships like that and you— it’s just building solid content to like making good content that people actually like and read. That’s how you get backlinks.
Matty: [00:33:54] The beautiful thing is there’s so much bad behavior around backlink spamming that the bar is relatively low.
Ali: Yeah.
Matty: To make yourself stand out. So it’s sort of like, I’m like, people treat, I always talk about this, people treat gate attendants at airports so terribly that me by just being vaguely nice is like, I’m amazing. Right? So the other thing is, so again, to Alex’s point, like you get so much, you know, we, we get this on the show all the time and we get all this stuff where it’s like, oh, I, you know, they, they grab a post and they’re like, would you like, and you’re like, there is zero connection, right? You’ve automated this down. It was a post about infrastructure is code and you want to connect it to something about like feng shui in your living room. I’m like, okay, but if you— if I get an email that says, hey, I read your post, here’s— again, you don’t have to work too hard— here’s 2 things that were interesting, but I know you actually read it, not just like you copy-pasted, but you’re like, you know what, I wrote a post about something similar, I think they’re connected, it might be cool. And even if you say I’m going to link to yours, you know, or I did link to yours, You know, maybe you might like, maybe there’s a connection, but like giving me that, this concept, I’m like, oh, okay. Because the whole thing is if you want the same thing too, is if you ever want somebody to do you a favor, don’t give ’em more work to do.
Ali: [00:35:04] Yeah.
Matty: Don’t be like, I wrote this thing, what do you think? Right. Be like, here’s why I think they’re connected.
Ali: Yeah.
Matty: You know, you need, you, you know, so do a little work.
Ali: Oh, totally. And it’s, there’s a snowballing with content creation too, is that you think that you’re writing a blog post or you do, and then you get asked to write a conference talk based off of that, and then you ask get asked to do 3 podcast interviews based off of it. So your content creator friends are probably really, really busy. It just tends to spiral. Um, but which is great.
Matty: And also, it’s also a great way to— so repurposing content is amazing too. So if you give a lot of talks and you want to get into blogging, so my trick lately is I just take my talks and I make them blogs, and suddenly I get that, right? And there’s, there’s a little work to it, right? I’m not just dumping out my speaker notes Yeah. You know, or something. But it’s, it’s giving, and it’s great because it expands your audience. Yes. Um, when it, when it comes to that and it get, and you can go vice versa too. So if you’re thinking like you wanna start giving a talk, maybe you’ve written a bunch of blogs, you’re like, this could actually be a talk.
Ali: Yeah.
Matty: So, but to Allie’s point, like again, you do hit this thing where you write a thing and then people are like, can you make it this? Can you make it this? Can you make it this? And especially when it’s their job, then they’re all like, lemme give you some OKRs around all this other crap that you have to do. And you’re like, great.
Ali: [00:36:16] Fantastic. Yeah. It’s definitely wild. But yeah, so going off of all of the— so circling back, you wanted to talk about assholes on the internet. Oh yeah, that too. But also the third strategy for gaining readership would be to cross-post. So we talked a little bit about Dev earlier on this conversation, and the really nice thing about posting there, and I used to post to Medium as well, I think that their community has changed a little bit, so it’s a little bit harder now. But the really awesome thing about that is that they have a built-in audience that’s already there. So you don’t have to build your own audience. You can leverage theirs and gain readership that way as well. And you can still post on your post— on your site as well. What you do is you add a canonical URL. Canonical URL says that, hey Google, this isn’t plagiarized. This isn’t duplicate content. It’s mine. I posted it here as well. And that’s actually going to help your SEO on your own site instead of hurting you. So there’s really no real downsides unless you really just only want people to read your own site.
Matty: [00:37:18] Another thing to look at along those lines when you look at places to do this within your organization, depends on the company you work for, but I can guess that if you are an organization of a certain size, and by certain size I don’t mean too big, but actually wherever you’re at, you might have an engineering blog. You might not even know about it, but if your company has something like that, they are dying for content.
Ali: Yes.
Matty: And they would love, love, love for you to help them with that. And it could be a really great place. And again, especially depending on your organization, you might be able to say like, can I cross-post this to my personal blog as well? You know, so this was something that, you know, was, it was 2 different places I’ve been where maybe it’s like I write it on my personal blog, then we do the canonical URL. So when it shows up on my company’s engineering blog, it can say this originally appeared on mattstratton.com, whatever kind of thing. So that does a couple great things. One, it’s just a different place. For people to see your words. It’s people who are coming to your organization’s eng blog that probably has a lot more readership than your personal one. There’s a nice little cross-link in there that says this is where it came from, and you’re helping your organization, which you maybe you want to do, maybe you don’t. I don’t know where you work. Maybe, you know, but maybe you want, you know. So always look into that, you know, to see how you can help with that, because it’s a great place that is usually not that well known.
Ali: [00:38:32] Yeah. You know, it makes it so that you have more time as well to create content. That’s another big factor for a lot of people is having the time to actually do this. And so that’s one strategy for making the time is making it part of your workday.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: And make it something that your company’s sponsoring.
Matty: Right. And make it maybe part of, if you’re gonna start building up this stuff and you have to, you have to, to be able to get to this suggestion I’m about to make, you have to have written something at some point. You can’t be like, this is this general thing I think I might want to do. But maybe have these conversations around, again, as part of your workflow, which is saying, as I’m developing in my career, and this is why it’s good for the organization for me to do this. So can I have a metric around, and be careful with this ’cause you don’t wanna like set something where you’re not gonna do it. But if your manager understands this is part of your work, and if you wanna, by the way, a little couple little tips to why this matters is one way, if you wanna help spin why you should be doing this content creation is it’s recruiting. Because if you’re— and again, depending on your organization, you may not be allowed to talk about things you do at work. That’s fine. But again, the places where that’s the case are fewer. You think you don’t, but you might. But that’s true, like at PagerDuty where I’m at. Like, the reason— one of the big reasons we like our engineers to write on our engineering blog and give talks is because we want people to hear about cool stuff we’re doing. So they’re like, I’m an engineer. Wow, it sounds like PagerDuty does cool shit. I want to go work there, right? You know, So there’s a lot of benefit to the organization and to your team besides just you yourself becoming a big thought leader and everything. It’s, it’s people will, will be interested in working there.
Ali: [00:40:08] Yeah. It’s also SEO for them too. Yeah, totally. So coming back to the assholes on the internet. So whenever I give talks about blogging, this is the number one question that comes up because it’s something that is really hard to deal with is criticism on your work. Sure. And then also criticize them on yourself. I think that’s been the hardest thing for me is that instead of people just saying, oh, you have a bug in your code or something like that, people can get really personal and start destroying you instead of just your work. And that’s something that is really hard to deal with, especially at first. So dealing with that, I think that there are a lot of different strategies for that. I think one of them is just realizing that people aren’t doing this because they’re super happy and in a great place and because their lives are super fabulous. It’s coming from a place of hurt and a place of, like, destruction on their part. And so thinking about that is important so that you don’t just go completely wild on them and get really angry or anything like that. So know that it comes from a place from hurt from them. But then another piece of it is knowing that it’s not just you. It’s going to happen to every single content creator where their stuff gets people to read it on a large basis. It’ll be less people than you think it is. I think, at least in my opinion, I think starting out writing content, especially as a young woman on the internet, I was like, oh, it’s going to be an absolute dumpster fire from day one. People are going to be awful to me. And it wasn’t that way at all. I went pretty much a year without dealing with any of the bullshit. It really only happened a year into content creation when one of my things got onto the front page of Reddit. That was awful. But knowing that it probably actually won’t be as bad as you think it is, At least from an outside perspective. And then the third thing that I do that I really stand by is I don’t want to respond to a lot of these negative people, but I do want to vent about it. And so I will write out a response to it. I will screenshot that response, send it to like a couple of my best friends who understand what I’m doing, and then delete it. Like, don’t look at the comments again. It doesn’t matter that much. It’s just one isolated person on the internet. Like, But you have that place to vent. You can go off about it and then just throw away that response.
Matty: [00:42:27] I think, yeah. And I think one thing for me, especially I’m aware of this, you know, when you come from a position of privilege, like we don’t want to minimize what it’s like for under-indexed folks, right? Like, so Ali’s experience is going to be— I’m sorry, it is, period. It’s going to be shittier than mine, right? For lots of reasons. And so it’s— but then one of the things that can be helpful, I’ve been that person And by the way, I need to talk really quick so you don’t think I’m going to say I’ve been that person that says shitty stuff on the internet, but I’ve been that person that’s been part of that vent network. So I have friends who do receive this criticism and then I’m someone they can dump it on.
Ali: Yeah.
Matty: Right. And that’s a thing. So especially if you’re someone that doesn’t have to deal with that, that’s a place you can do. But again, the trick of it, if you’re going to want to do that, is just be like, that’s really shitty. I’m sorry that happened to you. And now I’m done. Right.
Ali: Right.
Matty: Because the whole point, there’s no, there’s no problem solving involved here. There’s no, oh, here’s how you should respond to them. It’s just more like, Wow, what an asshole. Yeah, I’m sorry you had to hear that.
Ali: 100%. You know, also don’t minimize it either.
Matty: Yeah.
Ali: Or be like, oh, it’s just what comes with the territory. Yeah, you should expect it. No, nobody should have to deal with that. Yeah, sucks. It’s awful. But that being said, it is a reality. There’s no way to really get around it if you’re going to make content on the internet and if people are gonna read it. Like, it’s gonna happen.
Matty: [00:43:40] So yeah, I think that’s the thing. It’s like, it’s By, by, by us saying that it’s a thing that’s going to happen doesn’t mean that we’re trying to normalize or say that it’s okay that it happens.
Ali: Um, but having some strategies in mind to, to help with that is, is certainly, um, you’re not alone in it and you’re allowed to be annoyed by it. You’re allowed to be angry about it. You’re allowed to feel hurt by it. It’s not anything like that. You’re allowed to vent. You’re allowed to respond however you want as well. These are just my strategies and what I do. And I don’t like the dumpster fire that comes from responding because it turns generally turns into a spectacle. So yeah.
Matty: All right, so we’ve had a lot of talk about strategies on kind of building this content, like why it matters, why you might be interested. And just sort of as a final thought, and we’ve touched on this, but maybe we can kind of put a bow on this. Where do you get your ideas from?
Ali: Oh, I love that. So one thing is the problem that you had that you couldn’t solve, that was hard for you to think through, that’s probably a great place for you to write the content that would have helped past you. What is the blog post that you were Googling for this thing for forever, you could not find the perfect blog post that answered your question? Write that post. Another thing is just writing your story. You don’t even have to write something super, super technical. Your story of how you got into tech is probably unique. Your story about how you solved some problem is probably unique. Um, your problem about how your discussion of how you started speaking is probably different. Like all these things you have a unique perspective on. And so just write that out. It doesn’t have to be this super technical tutorial or anything like that. Just write it and I’m sure it’ll help somebody. If not, it’ll just help you. And then other things would be anything that you are an expert on or you want to look like an expert on or you want to learn. My whole entire principle of my first blog, what I started writing about was I learned a new technology every week. I built an app with it and I wrote a blog post about it. So I was coming from a total beginner’s perspective on all these things, talking about how hard or how easy it was to learn, how good the documentation was, how bad the documentation was. That was the whole entire thesis of my blog. I was not an expert on these things at all.
Matty: [00:45:58] Those are the— I absolutely love reading that way. And so there’s a phenomenal story. So Annie Hedgepeth, who when she was entering the tech industry, she decided for various reasons, we’ll put a link in the show notes to kind of a great talk she gives about this, but she decided to take on Inspect, which was a brand new technology that nobody knew jack shit about at the time. So she wrote a blog that was sort of, it was exactly what Allie just said. It was as she went, she’s like, okay, so today I learned this thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then it was like next week, it’s like, now I learned this thing and I learned this thing. And you know what, I don’t know if it’s still true because this was a couple years ago, but for a very long time, if not still today, the Inspect documentation was Annie’s blog. Like, that’s what the Inspect project did, is they’re like, oh well, this is actually great docs. And, and it became— and now she’s, she’s a consultant specializing in this area. And it’s all, you know, kind of— yeah, like sharing your journey. Yeah, it’s so interesting to me because it, it makes it accessible. It says like, okay, this was someone who’s gonna, you know, just because it’s also like, that’s how you learn. It’s accessible in that this was someone who started with not an understanding, and I can visualize what they understood because they literally telling me, right? You know, and I think so. I think telling, yeah, like a journey story, uh, and I also, that did the same thing when I’m doing like talk curation for like DevOps conferences, I’m like, come and tell your story. Your journey story is what I care about. So, my last little bit about where you get your ideas from, and this is self-serving. So, everybody, I’m gonna take a couple minutes for this. So, all those ideas are super great for when you’re doing this because you have an idea, right? You’re like, okay, an idea came to me, so now I’ll do a thing. Some of us sometimes have to have an idea because you actually have to have one because it comes up and you’re like, Huh, it’s getting to be about November. November is when I start writing my abstracts for the next year. I need to come up with some ideas for talks. Like I said, maybe this is self-serving. So, Ellie, what are some of your ways when you— because I think you’re in a similar situation sometimes because you have to come up with a class, you have to come up with workshops, you have to come up with pitches and blogs and content. So sometimes we don’t always have the luxury of when inspiration strikes, we’ll do something about it. We sometimes have to force inspiration or invite it maybe. So what are some of the ways you do that?
Ali: [00:48:29] Yeah, so this is ConvertKit’s brand, which kind of is a little bit weird to me, but their logo or their slogan is teach everything that you know. I love that. I have this massive bumper sticker and this t-shirt that I wear all the time, even though I’m like pitching their company and not intentionally, but I just love that motto of teach everything you know. And so you know something that other people don’t, or you know it from a different perspective than they do. And so sharing that is really, really important. And so I think the biggest thing here is that these ideas, they might not become super, super obvious at first, but they will over time. And it becomes easier to see all these things when, um, you’re working through them. So you’re Googling something, not finding it, and all that. I love complete beginner’s guides to things. That’s what I’ve kind of found my niche is, is writing everything that I know about a very beginner-type topic, like complete beginner guide to programming. Like, what is programming?
Matty: [00:49:30] What does it mean? What does it mean to tell a computer what to do?
Ali: Right, like, what even is this? I taught a workshop on that for a community resource center in DC, and it was such an interesting thing to talk about because it’s like, what, what is this thing that I do all day, every day? But from totally zero, even before my CS 101, like what is all that? But then on top of that, the shiny and new things, I think that’s really interesting. Just people like that and you’ll get to be on the forefront of it. And then repurposing content, we talked about that as well. If you had a tweet that people liked or if you had blog post or a conference talk or any of those things that somebody liked in a different format, repurposing that into a new format would be another great strategy as well. But my biggest thing here is that there are all these strategies for coming up with ideas, and you’ll start to have these random ideas when you’re walking your dog or you’re Googling things. And the biggest thing is to write them down when you have the idea, not when you are looking to write or when you’re liking looking to write a conference talk. Write it down when you have the idea because you’ll forget about it and you’ll have that writer’s block when you get to that actual page that you’re trying to write. And so that’s my biggest strategy is not to have these brainstorming sessions or anything like that, is just to write these things down and have a list of potential topics in the future.
Matty: [00:51:06] Well, this has been super fun and super fantastic. By the way, like I said, that last question was really self-serving. So when you’re listening to this episode, If you have ideas for what you’d like to see me create content for in 2020, find me on Twitter @MattStratton. I would love to hear what talks or things you want me to do because that’s what I’m spending my November working on is having ideas, which sounds like a really fun job to have until you have to have an idea. And the reality is you have the ideas when you’re like cutting the grass or you’re in the shower.
Ali: Yeah.
Matty: Or you’re— or the worst part is when you’re driving.
Ali: Always.
Matty: And that’s so— but like, I think Allie’s right. Like, right, have a way to take the note. And what if it’s while you’re driving. We all have fancy phones that have Siri and OK Google. You don’t need to write them down. That’s a note to myself to remember that, so I don’t. So, yeah, but also, if you’re thinking about wanting to do speaking, don’t forget you can go to devopsdays.org/speaking. There’s a list of all the open CFPs. There’s tons of CFPs out there, lots of different ways to find them. I will put some links in the show notes to some of the different CFP trackers I know about, but we always mention the DevOpsDays one because I remember that. So, that’s pretty great. Go to arresteddevops.com to check out the show notes from this episode. I think we’re gonna have a bunch of great links. And if you go to arresteddevops.com/itunes, you can leave us a review in the iTunes store, which apparently helps people find the show. So, that’s great. You know, try not to be an asshole when you do it, but, you know, you do you. It’s fine. We do read all of them, and we might even read it on the show. We are also apparently on Spotify and iHeartRadio now. So, if you’re into those systems, subscribe to us there. Allie, thank you so much for being my guest here on the show. This has been a great conversation.
Ali: [00:52:50] Totally. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah.
Matty: Have a great time with your workshops and talks for the rest of the conference and all the other fun stuff. We’re right here on the eve of the conference starting. So, yeah, that’s great. So, remember, I’m Matt, @MattStratton on Twitter. This is Arrested DevOps, and as always, There’s always DevOps in the banana stand.
