The benefits of the Weekly Knowledge Candy sessions are:
- Little easy digestible topics
- Developers train their ability to give presentations and speeches
- 10 to 15 minutes focus helps to understand a topic
- Every developer is focusing on unfamiliar topics or going deep on areas of interest
The March 23 2019 Learning Snapshot made visible the topics that people are currently learning. These topics are a natural fit for presentation topics.
The important thing is to pick a topic you're unfamiliar with that will benefit you, your team and your work. Presenting an unfamiliar topic will stretch you and the goal of presenting will provide focus.
You may want to develop an area of expertise or specialism. See the FAQ.
- 10-15 minutes long
- Document the topic so it's self-explanatory. That way developers who haven’t been able to attend can read it whenever they like.
- Create a new "Present a topic" issue
- Complete all sections of the template (feel free to delete the checklist)
- Feel free to edit the issue description with supplementary details, before or after you're presentation
When will I present? Everyone must have one open issue in the list. We'll use the GitHub project boards (similar to Trello) to manage the backlog of presentations.
Each week, the goal is to have 2 presentations during learning time. This will take about about 30 minutes in total.
The week prior we'll move 2 presentations from the backlog into an "up next" column. We'll pick from the top of the backlog unless anyone wants to jump the queue. Once you've presented, we'll move the issue into a "done" column. You don't need to present again until everyone has presented.
How should I present? Prepare to present in any way you like. This can be on a whiteboard, Google Slides, purely code, or most often a mixture of several forms.
Do I need to answer questions at the end of my presentation? Yes. They'll be 2 minutes at the end of your presentation for questions.
Don't worry if you can't answer. ask the questioner to write down their question on your topic's GitHub issue. You can reply with the answer or loop in other developers to the issue conversation, asking for pointers.
How often am I expected to present? At the moment, we decided on 1 or 2 presentations per week. We currently have 27 Civil Servant developers. At this rate, it'd be every 3 months. In the future, we may up the frequency of presentations per week if it's not too taxing.
How much time does it take to prepare? It'll depend on two things:
- what level of details you choose for your transcript. Writing is definitely the part that takes the most time. It may take two hours to properly write down all the contents of a 10 minutes talk. It's strongly advise that you leave some trace of your talk, so that people can get back to it later, but the way you do it is really up to you. You can even just film the session and upload the video.
- How well you know the subject before starting. If you have to conduct research and experiments to build the contents of you talk, then the sky is the limit.
Remember, you're only expected to present once every three months, so lots of time for preparation.
What is a specialism / area of expertise? In a recent blog post on the LAA Developer Learning Confluence, Nick wrote this about specialisms:
In MoJ Digital and Technology, and specifically in LAA Digital, we have started to broaden our skills base, moving away from being a product specialist in the Oracle ecosystem to becoming generalist software engineers. However, we still require people to emerge as specialists in certain areas, but these are tied to standards rather than specific niche technologies. Think security champions, web standards and accessibility champions, language or framework leads, CI/CD champions, API design and standards champion. There’s probably lots more. There’s a minimum you’ll need to know to get your job done and, when required, we should call on those with deeper knowledge. People organically develop specialisms based on their experiences and interests. I’d encourage everyone to think intentionally about this and we can explore whether the idea of champions/specialists make sense to us as a profession going forward.