Using Go to teach Go

Wondering what steps you can take to help teach Go or train junior Gophers? Here are my slides from Golang Sheffield meetup group 6/12/18 that cover my experiences of mentoring juniors.

Transcript

1. Using Go to teach Go:
   A guide to mentoring Junior Gophers.
   By Will Gough.
   @whg_codes
   https://devtheweb.io
   

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2. Who am I?
   - Software Engineer @ Bet365 // Manchester
   - Started writing Go full-time in June @ Bet365. Writing as a hobby for 2ish years.
   - Previously worked for LadBible Group and Ampersand Commerce writing Node
   APIs, Laravel, and React apps.
   

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3. ➔ Context
   What, how, and why?
   ➔ Resources
   The tools at our disposal.
   ➔ Solutions
   Automated mentoring...
   

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4. Context
   Month 1
   Learning the basics,
   reading all materials.
   Month 2
   Start on their first training
   project.
   Month 3
   Start on their second
   training project.
   Finished!
   Juniors now ready to
   start hacking away at
   microservices.
   

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5. Provided Reading
   - The Go Programming Language.
   - Brian Kernighan, Alan A. A. Donovan
   - Site Reliability Engineering
   - Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall
   Richard Murphy
   - Concurrency in Go
   - Katherine Cox-Buday
   - Designing Data-Intensive Applications
   - Martin Kleppmann
   

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6. Additional Resources
   - Gophercises
   - Gobyexample
   - Learn go by tests
   - JustForFunc Youtube Channel
   - Gophers slack channel
   

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7. AutomatingzZz
   - Awesome Go toolchain
   - A ton of bash scripts
   - Makefiles
   - Pre-commit hooks
   - A load testing CLI
   - Automatic pprof web view
   

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8. What worked
   - Pair Programming
   - Online Resources
   - Pre-commit hooks & tooling
   - Self-directed learning
   - Hard to balance workload and
   mentoring on a 3 juniors.
   - Training materials lacked context and
   information on other important parts
   of being a developer e.g Git, JIRA
   - Everybody learns differently, it can’t
   be done in a one-size fits all.
   What didn’t
   

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9. My top tips for mentoring:
   Don’t take advantage
   of what you consider
   basic knowledge.
   Always encourage
   them to ask
   questions.
   Create opportunities
   for different types of
   learners.
   

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10. Any questions?
    @whg_codes
    https://devtheweb.io
    

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