#205 Eve Porcello revolves around teaching

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Eve Porcello 0:00
There's so many people that want to learn these things. And there's so many people who want to hear from you different teachers resonate with different people. So don't hesitate to jump in. Even if you feel like I'm new to this. It doesn't matter. You can, you can bring a lot of great information to people, no matter how long you've been working with something.

Tim Bourguignon 0:24
Hello, and welcome to developer's journey to podcast, bringing you the making of stories of successful software developers. To help you on your upcoming journey. I'm your host team building you on this episode 205. A receive even for seller, even as a co founder of Moon highway curriculum development and training company, teaching JavaScript Graph QL and react to take professionals around the world. She's also the co author of learning react, and learning Graph QL from O'Reilly Media. Welcome to dev journey.

Eve Porcello 0:58
Thank you so much. So happy to be here.

Tim Bourguignon 1:01
It's my pleasure. But before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific listeners who support the show every month, you are keeping the dev journey lights up. If you would like to join this fine crew and help me spend more time on finding phenomenal guests, then editing audio tracks, please go to our website, Dev journey dot info and click on the Support me on Patreon button. Even the smallest contributions are giant steps toward a sustainable dev journey. journey. Thank you. And now back to today's guest. For Eve. As you know, the show exists to help the listeners understand what your story looked like, and then imagine how to shape their own future. So as is usual in the show, let's go back to your beginnings. Where would you place to start off your tech journey?

Eve Porcello 1:53
Well, I would place it probably I was working in marketing, I was writing, I was laying out websites in Microsoft Word at a company. Yeah, wild times that was kind of consulting with Microsoft at that time. And then I ended up working in all these different kind of tech adjacent roles. And I was laying out websites writing content, doing marketing, planning, things like that. And my husband at the time, still my husband, I guess he wasn't even my husband at that time. But he was always trying to encourage me to get into programming. And then I took on a project working at this strange company called one 800 dentist, you call them up and they find a dentist for you. This was a big deal at that time. And I was helping them lay out their web projects. And I worked with a lot of developers who would constantly tell me that they couldn't get things done at a certain time. And I was just like, I need to know more about this. And then eventually, we moved to Lake Tahoe area. And there were absolutely no jobs here. And at that time, it was clear to me that I had to take the jump start working in this realm for real. And so that's when I sort of started to learn to program learned HTML and CSS and JavaScript and started to really like the power that came from being able to do some of those things on my own.

Tim Bourguignon 3:28
The people were telling me it can and cannot be done. This reminds me of one interview I did with with Sean Wang, who said he joined the Fine, I'll do it myself club.

Eve Porcello 3:39
Totally. Yeah, it's 100%. Like that. And I think just learning more about that made me a better manager of projects and things like that. Because I had I had no clue what was going on. I was like, is you're in charge? I don't know what I'm doing. I can put a timeline together, but nothing will really not. I don't have much input on this. So

Tim Bourguignon 4:05
yeah, it is weird. Indeed. When you have no idea if what people are telling you is remotely right or not. You just have to believe them. And you're totally awful.

Eve Porcello 4:15
Yeah, you're in a pretty vulnerable position there for sure.

Tim Bourguignon 4:20
Okay, before we get there, do you consider other options? Or was it the only the only option that came to mind and it really was the one you wanted to explore when you move to Lake Tahoe? Yeah, I mean, and said, Well, no, I need to embrace development.

Eve Porcello 4:34
I think that it was kind of a natural progression. I really liked writings, specifications and creating wireframes and things like that. And it felt like well, this is the next step of being able to take this project a little bit further. And yeah, I I looked around for jobs locally. And there were at that time, that's changed a little bit in the past 10 years, but But it's something that, yeah, I really needed a job. So at that time, it was like, Well, I better figure this out. And it became something that wasn't just a hassle or a burden to learn. It was really exciting. And it was a lot of fun. So it was a pretty easy transition in that way, easy in the decision, not in the actual execution, I think. I didn't mean to make it feel like it was too easy. Go ahead.

Tim Bourguignon 5:31
Take us through through this on this this transition. How did you discover what what? How this industry works? What you had to learn what you can omit with what suits your style, what doesn't? How did you progress in this unknown?

Eve Porcello 5:47
I think that, at that time, we were working on projects, sort of small web development projects for companies, that was local companies, that was companies that we found online to work with. And we just were kind of building building websites for them. So it was, at that time, I had to learn a lot of HTML and CSS, and JavaScript and jQuery. And a lot of that was through videos and reading things online in a panic, that I had to kind of get those skills dialed in before a deadline. And then it became sort of more organized and more of a learning path where I would kind of think through what I actually needed to know and be a little ahead of the game. So it was a lot of just watching videos, which is ironic, because that's what I do for my job now is create those, but I kind of use that time to really build my own projects and do as much learning as I could.

Tim Bourguignon 6:57
Did you have somebody to to hint at? Okay, now you need something called jQuery? Or how did that came to be? Yeah, so

Eve Porcello 7:05
that was a lot of working on projects. My coworker slash husband would help me with that. Also, other folks, we worked with other developers, there were very small developer communities here at that time that we would go to meetups and things like that locally, where people would talk about things that I'd never heard of, and I would scribble those down and learn those when I was away from the meeting. And yeah, it was really just a process of doing my best to kind of learn more about the community and things like that. But at that time, I really was kind of disconnected from a lot of the community that I feel like I'm a part of now where there are conferences that you can go to their meetups, you can go to their discord channels you can join that was, those were all things that I didn't quite understand that that time and looking back, it's kinda funny to think about.

Tim Bourguignon 8:04
Did you remember when when that flipped? That switch flipped? That flip

Eve Porcello 8:09
switched? I like it that way more? Well, I think, I think for just interrupting you, I think that the kind of process of learning about conferences and things like that was very late. We started our company in 2012. The first conference we went to was in 2017. So I think five years went by where we were doing a lot of things on an island, sort of, and not really learning about things from the community. But as we started to realize there's these awesome developer events, you can go to and meet people and commiserate about the pain that you're experiencing at your job and celebrate the things that are going well. We went to a conference in San Jose, the O'Reilly conference, fluent there. The name escapes me for a moment, but rest in peace, Fluent Conf, but it was a great time and we met tons of people. And we were like, Oh, this is we should be doing more in the in the world. And that's really changed. Kind of everything about how was your

Tim Bourguignon 9:15
business orientation, maybe all the business of your orientation of your of your company before and after this this moment? Was that was there a difference?

Eve Porcello 9:25
I think so. I think it was a transition that had started before. But we are so proud. We're so close. So proximate to the bay area here. And we started to teach pretty early on when we started our companies. So there were companies like Yahoo and Pay Pal and others that were starting to roll out No, Jas, and a lot of people had to learn JavaScript, like it or not. So there were a lot of Java developers who were needing to learn these technologies and we started to teach them And then react sort of picked up after that as something we were teaching and then that transitioned into fully teaching. But to answer your question at that time, when we were thinking about kind of how we could get more involved in the community, that's really what exploded things to the next level for us, which was that you can go to conferences and meet people, and they will pull you in to teach or that you can help them learn things in other ways, like newsletters or videos or things like that. So it just created this audience and this sense of community that we hadn't had before.

Tim Bourguignon 10:40
I see, I see, did I get your right? Mono at the beginning was more of a consulting company more and more doing doing websites. And at some point, you transitioned more toward the learning community became when when did that happen? And how did you decide on going from one to the other?

Eve Porcello 10:57
Yes, you're absolutely right. I think probably the first two years, we were almost 100%, doing consulting work, we were working with companies to launch a website at a strict deadline. And it was, it was a stressful time, because there were only two of us. And I was very new to what I was doing at that time. And it was it was a lot. So throughout, kind of the next few years, we started to focus more and more on training. And then really what kind of cemented that was working with LinkedIn learning, which was lynda.com, at the time, we started creating videos with them. And that started to kind of create a library of classes that we could go teach. And we started to formulate a process for doing that that would be repeatable, and something that people would want to be a part of. And so at that time, I would say in the last three or four years, we have been building developer tools, there's always an idea that kind of, if you're teaching, you're not really doing work in the world of development, which I understand that as a critique. But we've sort of transitioned away from client work to building tools for teachers. And those are kind of time management tools and curriculum management tools. So it lets us still work in the world and have actual use cases that aren't Hello worlds and things that might not be as real world. But we're able to have our hands in that work, even though we're not doing client projects that are so deadline driven. So we're less stressed out.

Tim Bourguignon 12:46
Do you want to tell us more about this? This is a tool for teachers? Sure. I wonder where that is?

Eve Porcello 12:51
Yeah. So this is something that, hopefully, will be something that we can roll out more broadly, this year, we're basically building tools that allow a teacher to manage a classroom. And by that, I mean, if I'm going to a class, and I want it to go, well, I need to consider time. So the time management aspect of teaching is sometimes overlooked, because there's a lot going on, your computer might die, your students are asking questions, there's things going on outside of your control. But the thing that's most important is to really make sure that you're teaching the topics that you said, you're gonna come teach that day. So we built a tool called time splitter, more, more soon view can use the tool to kind of guide you through the class. So if you have three hours to teach a workshop on React, you have it all broken down minute to minute, so that every time you teach the class, it's the same afterwards, you'll have metrics about how it went, where you got stuck, what samples are taking too long or not taking long enough. And in using that, it's just making it such that classes are have a more repeatable outcome. And you don't also feel as stressed out if you're, if there are things happening outside of your control that cause anxiety as you're teaching so that it feels better.

Tim Bourguignon 14:25
Okay, I see. I see. I've been doing this in the presenter notes of all my presentations. Totally. You should be 30 minutes now. And the next section is going to take three minutes.

Eve Porcello 14:40
Okay, yeah, yeah, that's the vibe. It's a teacher notes and presenter notes. And it just keeps your code really organized so that you're teaching the right things at the right time, because you know how it can be standing in front of a room of people. Time becomes this amorphous thing that you can't really wrap your head around. So that will help.

Tim Bourguignon 15:02
Typical end of presentation. Well, I'm a bit late, so we're gonna flip over those 30 slides real quick, absolutely. Okay, okay, I see. I see. Sorry. Can we dig a bit deeper in this? Sure, yeah. Are you building it on top of some presentation framework already? Or did you build your whole system? Did? Is it overly on to some other tools? Or is it kind of add on to something better?

Eve Porcello 15:32
Yeah. So right now we're using we built it pretty much from scratch, we're just using a Graph QL API for the content, and then using a React front end. And then we have React Native apps for the watch, actually, which is kind of cool. Because you can if you're walking around the classroom, which we haven't really done for a while, but I would assume at some point, we'll be in person again, and you walk around to help people, but you still want to stay on time. Also apps for the phone as well. So those are kind of what we're going for at the moment. And then we use, we're just creating kind of a content database for all of the classes that we're teaching. So JavaScript and Graph QL, and rust and things like that. And our hope is that others can kind of fork our materials and teach those eventually, as well. So

Tim Bourguignon 16:30
that means all your trainings are available somehow, publicly, or semi publicly or not at all, publicly.

Eve Porcello 16:38
Yeah, so we're not we're not quite there in deciding. But we're hoping, first of all, all of our training materials are so if you want to our GitHub repos are all open for things like that. But as far as the teacher notes go, we haven't quite figured that part out. But the, the goal would be to have other teachers teach her materials, a lot of the companies we work with have huge groups of trainers who are teaching various classes. And their job is very hard, because they're expected to teach react, and Angular, and I don't know, Java, and every other thing, onboarding, whatever that might be. So our goal is to support them through the kind of pains of having to be a master of all these topics.

Tim Bourguignon 17:31
I think I see how would you deal with the the ambivalence of building the product you would like to have as a as a small company or as a person, and then tackling the whole group of people sharing content, like you said, and I imagine a group of 20 teachers traveling around the country and doing react on Monday and angular on Tuesday and or on Monday afternoon, and just shipping like this and doing going back and forth, do the two different kind of requirements that you would need? How do you handle that?

Eve Porcello 18:05
Well, it definitely comes from our perspective of teaching these classes and the things that we would like to see our own notes do for us how we would want our own notes to kind of guide us through the content for the day. But we're working with a lot of other companies who are kind of testing out these apps and beta. So we're getting good feedback about not all good feedback, but you know what I mean, useful feedback about the content and how the app actually works. So there's a lot of people actually using this for their own classes. And hopefully collecting that feedback can make us a little less locked into our own vision of what that should be versus product that can be useful to as many people as possible, because there's a lot of people who are teaching I've also talked to our main audience for something like this is technology teachers, but I've talked to people who teach exercise classes or other types of classes, and it's all the same, really, you're dealing with time, as you have an hour, you have eight hours, fill the time and make sure that you're on track during that time, because that's something that can make a class really turn on you, even if they like you and think you're a good instructor is how is my time being managed? Is someone talking at five o'clock, even though it's, it should have ended at 430. And all of those things can really help people get into teaching and I think a lot of people are afraid of teaching for that reason, because it feels like there's people looking at me I have to be a perfect expert. How am I going to remember how I have to move through this material and Teaching has been such a huge thing for my career and me personally. And I think that other people could get a lot of benefits out of that for their own career. So hopefully that will help them.

Tim Bourguignon 20:15
And I'm not being heavily heavy part of mine as well. Remember 12 years ago now, when my my I joined a consulting company, and my boss came to me and said, you know, you know, you're supposed to teach, right, so what's going to be your next talk, and we expect you to go to a conference, two months from now, I looked at him said words. I mean, I thought I had some some some leniency period, I could ramp up slowly, maybe do a talk from somebody else. No. Now you're going to go there. But it's been it's been a roller coaster citizen. I really love this, this this situation where where people can ask you a question any just frequency? I don't know. But let's try to wait to go down the rabbit hole and keeping an eye on your clock and saying, Well, we don't we just have to have 10 minutes to go down. And then I can manage the rest of the time at the time schedule, because I don't have the tools maybe with your tool Vizier. Okay, let's go down the rabbit hole, try to find the answer to this question. And if I don't, that's fine. That's okay. That's okay not to have the answer and then dig into it during the break or during during lunch break? And come back to later with a with an answer. So I really love this, this feeling.

Eve Porcello 21:27
Yeah, and what you said about not having to know the answer is so important to I feel like, early on in teaching, I would always feel like I have to have every answer for every single question. And that's not possible. But those questions will if you don't know the answer, lead you to all sorts of cool understanding and knowledge for yourself that will help you answer the question better moving forward and help you know more things moving forward. So you're always learning as you're teaching, I guess is my cheesy point. But it's true.

Tim Bourguignon 22:02
It isn't. It isn't always your own learning. How do you handle the development part of your life and the teaching part of your life? Do you keep losing balance? How do they feed each other? How do you handle that?

Eve Porcello 23:05
Right now we're so focused on all things teaching that it becomes feed food for, what am I talking about? It comes through becomes nourishment for I think each other because we're always trying to create new classes. And right now we're working on a lot of Graph QL, curriculum and node curriculum and having the real world use cases of this app is kind of pushing those materials further, which is cool for us. Because there's a lot of people who have a lot of a lot of hard work to do in the world of development. So we want to have our materials be as real world as possible. So it's a nice little hybrid, working on client projects. And then teaching was sometimes wildly different stacks that we would be working with, because maybe we were working on a project that had been around for a long time. And it prevented us from really using the latest and greatest tools for the job. And so because we're working on our own thing, we can kind of use what we want. So that's kind of cool, too, to say, Hey, I've never used, I haven't used React Native in a real production app before. Let's do it. Let's try it and not just do the beginner stuff, but use it for real. And let's create a schema that can be used across projects with Graph QL. That is written really nicely and it's exciting to be able to do both at the same.

Tim Bourguignon 24:44
Do you have a story of something you really wanted to try on your real life project because you wanted to teach it and then you tried it and run into a wall?

Eve Porcello 24:54
Well, I think let's see. I think that we are constantly trying trying to use rust in our projects. And that's something that we we haven't quite figured out how to use it alongside those tools that we're best at, there's a tendency to just be like and know JavaScript really well, I know, I feel really well, let's just use that, and not not use this new thing. So I think we, we wanted to, we had this whole lofty goal of rust and using the blockchain for all this stuff together. And it was like, well, we're, we have a big learning curve before we're actually able to do that. So maybe we should try to get this thing out. So people can actually use it versus, I don't know, hanging out, talking about how we must use this one technology. So I think there's a tendency to try to reach for the newest thing, which I like to teach, and I think is exciting to teach. But ultimately, when you're in your own project that can, there can be a learning curve that holds people back from learning those things, but then it makes you want to go create better learning materials around those things. So I don't know, it's all, it's all a balance. But I would say, sometimes, it's easy to get just comfortable using those tools that you that you like and that you know how to use because you know, you can move faster. And I don't, don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. Because getting things done is awesome. So

Tim Bourguignon 26:36
absolutely, and nothing wrong with this. But I always I always wonder how other people deal with this, this ambivalence of learning the new and shiny to be able to teach it and not necessarily screwing up your actual project with there's a such thing as as learning on your job and screw up screwing up your project with that. And so it's a real difficult balance.

Eve Porcello 27:09
It's a fine line. Yeah. But I would say that you shouldn't hesitate to use those things. But I think not sometimes at the expense of your project ever getting launched, I would say. So. I think there's, there's examples of that in the past more, more than working on this project. Now, I feel like we would if we would just propose some new tech technology to our client, and be really bogged down in a technology choice that we were so passionate about, like, we should use this and learn about this. And realistically, that has led to a lot of extra stress in many cases, because people just want a website. Number one, if you're working on client projects like that, they want a website that looks good. They don't really care about a lot of things going on behind the scenes. They want it to work, obviously. But a lot of those kind of granular technology changes are wildly important, but they're also a fine line. Right? It's a balance of making sure that you're kind of prioritizing the project getting done over using the shiny tool.

Tim Bourguignon 28:28
First make it work can make it work make it right, make it fast. Was it I think yeah,

Eve Porcello 28:33
exactly. Make it work for us. Make it work.

Tim Bourguignon 28:38
as well. I mean.

Tim Bourguignon 28:44
Okay, I mentioned reading your bio that you wrote or co authored two books will Riley, how did that happen? How do you come to suddenly? Or not? So not so suddenly writing a book for O'Reilly? How did that work?

Eve Porcello 28:59
We had created some courses on React for LinkedIn learning lynda.com in 2015. And at that time, react was pretty new. It was something that we were we were teaching this technology called Why UI. It's a Yahoo, you user interface library at Yahoo. And then they had a conference every year we were teaching at this conference. And then one year, they said they were canceling the conference and canceling why UI in favor of this new thing called react. And we didn't know what react was. So we're looking it up and we're getting excited about it and ended up kind of being able to teach those classes online for LinkedIn. And then literally, I looked on the website, though, Riley website, they were taking proposals for book topics, and I think it was just the right place at the right time thing with React. It was a new tech Golgi there was one book that existed, but a lot had changed with react in a short period of time. And so we ended up being able to submit a proposal for that and write the book from there. Before that though, we had. So Riley is based in Sebastopol, California, which is a really beautiful town in wine country in California. And we lived in Sonoma, right before this as well. And we saw this O'Reilly book that was at a bookstore in Sebastopol. And it had like a husband and a wife sitting on the back book cover. My husband and I were like, we'll get our face on the back of a book cover someday. And we'll have, it was just such a funny photo, like the people looked like, they just looked very, very quaint to me. And we were thinking, we'll definitely do that someday. And so that was sort of our goal in the back of our head for five, six years. And it was just the right technology that brought us to that opportunity, because not a whole lot of people were teaching that. So that's what I always say about those books or classes or things like that, which kind of flies in the face of the advice I just gave, which was Don't, don't reach for that new shiny thing. Sometimes do. Learn about that new shiny thing, because not everybody, especially if you want to teach it because not everybody knows what that new shiny thing is. And you can hopefully break it down for them in a way that they would understand.

Tim Bourguignon 31:34
Don't Don't don't do what I do what I say.

Eve Porcello 31:37
Yeah, don't, don't listen to me. But listen to this next thing I say. That's good advice. Right? Okay, cool.

Tim Bourguignon 31:47
You seem to have an impressive synergy with your partner working day to day together writing a book together? How do you how do you split the work between between you? How do you organize yourself? Writing a book is not an easy endeavor. And so how do you manage? How do you balance all that and choose who does what, when and not fight the whole time?

Eve Porcello 32:10
Yeah, that's a good question. I think I, for the, for the book, specifically, that's something that really started with a clear outline of what we wanted to cover and what those topics would be. And then for both of our books, we've created in a lot of our courses, it'll involve creating some sort of an app that has the topics that we want to cover, so that we can continually teach this app throughout the book or throughout the video course so that people can build something sort of concrete. So the way we work together on that is really to build that together, and then go in our separate directions after we've built it. And that involves rebuilding it a million times to make sure that it's covering everything that we want to cover. And then the way that we've handled the books is just writing different chapters. So we'll say you write this chapter about React Router, I'll write this one about state management, or whatever that might be. And then we kind of create our own drafts of that and then do a lot of editing of those. So it doesn't sound like you're jumping from one voice to another from chapter to chapter because that makes sense. You can tell who wrote what, but hopefully not, not too much. But I think that's a good way to break that down. Especially, even if you're not living in the same house as a married person, you may work on the book together or project together and just trying to really be clear about who's doing what makes it a lot better for you not getting mad at that person. Or them knocking getting mad at you. Yes, harmony is a great is a much better way to say that cuts down on anger.

Tim Bourguignon 34:05
Do you have any more books in your mind or in your collective minds?

Eve Porcello 34:10
In our collective minds? I think right now? That's a good question. I think, right now we're kind of focused on course, materials and things like that. But we're always, we're always thinking about books, maybe a rust book is in us somewhere. That could be fun. We're also thinking about maybe a kind of a no JS and rust comparison guide type thing, because a lot of our background is in JavaScript and a lot of the terminology that we know well, we can sort of overlay that onto rust, so that's always in the back of our head too. So that's a long ways out though, so please don't expect that for me any very, too. CLAY

Eve Porcello 35:06
I'm so stressed out now.

Tim Bourguignon 35:08
I mean, this podcast will come out in June. So it's

Eve Porcello 35:11
something so a month away, but three weeks.

Tim Bourguignon 35:17
One thing that I'm I'm reading between the lines, but one thing I think I'm seeing is an absolutely astonishing reuse pattern. Everything you're doing, you're reusing it in some other way, building on top of it, rehashing it and bringing it in a different form to probably a different audience that needs something else a different format. And and building on that, and then mixing again and mixing in. Is it in equal that I'm losing? I'm missing a word. Is it intentional? Or is does it happen? Because you're following your style and what you want to do, and it happens to be successful? How do you see this?

Eve Porcello 35:59
I think that we definitely reuse a lot of the contents, that content we create in different ways. So a lot of times, that'll start out with just the learning process where we're researching something, learning something, building something with it. And then that often becomes a course of some sort that often becomes from there, maybe you'll write blog posts about that course. And then that becomes a workshop that is taught to engineers at a company somewhere. So yeah, we definitely are focusing on the same areas a lot. I think that's something that I failed at a lot. When I was early on teaching, we were teaching through other companies who were getting contracts to teach these courses for big companies. And they would come to me and say, Hey, can you go teach this topic? Can you go teach Angular? Can you go teach react? And at that time, I was sort of like, sure, yeah, I can do that. I, I'm sure I could figure that out. But our scope has really narrowed a lot, where we're only teaching a certain list of topics and not really going beyond that. And that's something that can get you in trouble, I would say is not maintaining that focus. So that focus on those same things has led to a pretty big library of content around those things. And that's something that yeah, definitely is repurposed and re reimagined for different audiences. A lot of times, in a workshop, you can go deeper than you can in a video or the book is way deeper than that, then either of those. So there's a lot of opportunity for reuse. So you're not building something new. Absolutely. Every time.

Tim Bourguignon 38:00
Sounds it's you found the right spot for yourself, your your voices is all shiny as he sparkles in your eyes. The listeners cannot see this. But when you're talking about it, do you see yourself doing this the next 20 years?

Eve Porcello 38:14
That's a good question that I've thought about, I really do. I think my I've gotten lucky in the fact that I can do this job and continue to build my own skills at the time that I'm teaching. And I'm hopeful that with the next 20 years, I can help other people get into teaching more and create more resources for other teachers. I am sort of, I thought I might be more burned out with teaching than I am. I'm kind of not, because I really do like it a lot. So I'm hopeful that I continue to like it and enjoy working with people. But I I can't say that I wouldn't. So that's lucky.

Tim Bourguignon 39:02
Well, what would be the best piece of advice you have for somebody who, who never stepped into teaching yet? Who hasn't dipped their toes in there? But it's thinking, maybe that would be something for me? Maybe not, I don't know, what's the first step you could do?

Eve Porcello 39:17
So I did this wrong. And I my advice comes from this place, which was, I went and taught at a company that expected me to be a super expert in front of 50 people who are just sitting there with their arms cross, just looking for me to fail. And that didn't go that badly. But it was a very high stress way of dipping my toe into teaching, which was go teach in front of super experts who think you are not very smart and you're interrupting their work. So that was that was a whole lesson learned for me which was good. If I could do it again, I would probably go teach at a meet up or teach something internally at my company or teach in a setting where I can collect feedback about what went well. But it doesn't. It's not a huge problem if it doesn't. So, when we started teaching Graph QL courses, it was a new topic for us. Not a new topic to us, but a new topic that we were teaching and new curriculum and things like that. So we have started for all of our classes, teaching a free version of it, and just mining the participants for feedback on how that goes. And then using that to make the actual first class a lot stronger. So there's so many people that want to learn these things. And there's so many people who want to hear from you different teachers resonate with different people. So I would just say, don't hesitate to jump in. Even if you feel like I'm new to this, it doesn't matter. You can, you can bring a lot of great information to people, no matter how long you've been working with something.

Tim Bourguignon 41:11
Absolutely. I just want to highlight this, again, different people resonate with different styles or different different people teaching them. This is so important is so often I hear well, but what can I add? I mean, there's some courses on Pluralsight. There's 20,000 videos on YouTube and from people who know their stuff. And I don't know, why should I will? Because there's one person in the audience who will react to what you're saying, and and who needs your voice and who is not reacting to the rest of it. And that's, that's why Amen to that.

Eve Porcello 41:44
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like, it can be very daunting, especially if you're teaching something that you feel like, oh, there's someone already teaching this, that is the expert at it, and I could never be that person. But I see even in our own company, we will have students who are obsessed with my husband, Alex, as a teacher, they love everything he says, and everything is life changing to them that he says, and it's really exciting, because you see how certain people gravitate toward the way someone explained something. And that can really make an impact on them. So it doesn't matter. If there's people in the space already. I wouldn't hesitate to jump into that. Because, yeah, there's think about yourself, watching videos are the people you learn from those are different from other how other people learn. So yeah, there's no, no reason to hesitate.

Tim Bourguignon 42:46
And I'm not thinking heavily.

Eve Porcello 42:49
just reiterating what you said, Oh, that's

Tim Bourguignon 42:52
awesome. That's awesome. That's really awesome. Where would be the best place to find you online, read more about you and maybe start a discussion with you?

Eve Porcello 43:00
Sure, you can go to Moon highway.com, we're going to be launching some new classes there that many of which are free, which is exciting. And then you can find me on other platforms Eve poor cielo. That's a very weird name. So I have it on most platforms. So you can find me on Twitter, GitHub, wherever feels right to you.

Tim Bourguignon 43:24
And we'll have a bunch of links in the show notes so that you don't have to search. But otherwise, you posted everywhere. If thank you very, very much. It's been a

Eve Porcello 43:33
blast. Yeah, so much fun. Thank you for having me. And this

Tim Bourguignon 43:37
has been another episode of the restaurant eat with each other next week. Bye. Thanks a lot for tuning in. I hope you have enjoyed this week's episode. If you liked the show, please share rate and review. It helps more listeners discover those stories. You can find the links to all the platforms to show appears on our website, Dev journey dot info, slash subscribe. Creating the show every week takes a lot of time, energy, and of course money. Would you please help me continue bringing out those inspiring stories every week by pledging a small monthly donation, you'll find our patreon link at Dev journey dot info slash donate. And finally, don't hesitate to reach out and tell me how this week store is shaping your future. You can find me on Twitter at @timothep ti m o t h e p or per email info at Dev journey dot info. Talk to you soon.