Two months ago I had the great pleasure of attending PyCon, one of North America's largest PyCon conferences in the beautiful city of Montreal. As a community manager, I’ve been to quite a few developer conferences over the last few years, but this happened to be my first Python conference. At the time I had just begun to really dig into Python, and with Hackbright just around the corner the timing of PyCon could not have been more perfect.
The conference -- just as I had hoped -- was wonderful. I was impressed with how kind and welcoming the Python community was and how diverse they were in their interests, industries, geographies, and backgrounds. I met data scientists from Boston, undergraduate astronomers from Wisconsin, linguists from Puerto Rico, hardware hackers from Nicaragua and many, many others. It was reassuring to see that there are in fact all kinds of people in software.
I attended several great talks, although Sasha Laundy’s “Your Brain’s API: Giving and Getting Technical Help” really made an impact on me. Being articulate and asking concise technical questions has been a crucial part of my learning process. It’s the skill I rely on when I hit a wall and am unable to solve a problem on my own.
Here’s a few of Sasha’s takeaways that I found useful:
Rules for asking for technical help:
Confusion is a sign you’re about to learn something.
Ask for feedback when you’re about 30% done with a project instead of 90%. You’ll be much more likely to implement their feedback this way.
When asking a question, try following this formula:
My current understanding is ___. I expect to see ___ here but instead it’s doing __. Why?
Rules for giving technical help:
Remember “the curse of knowledge”: you can forget what it’s like to learn a new topic.
Watch your language. Avoid terms like “easy,” “obviously”, “just”, “well actually”, which can come off as dismissive or condescending.
These guidelines are immeasurably valuable for a beginner like myself, but they can also apply to all experience levels (and even disciplines). Overall communication skills help you become a better programmer, a better teammate, and ultimately help you produce better products.
Check out Sasha’s full talk above, and read her blog for more resources.
