Sean Tibor: M hello, and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 149, and this week we're going to be talking about guiding education with our good friend Sheena o'. Connell. My name is Shawn Tyber. I'm a coder who teaches, and my. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Name is Kelly Schuster Paredes, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: Welcome to the podcast, Sheena. We are so excited to have you here, and I think it's actually been so long since we've recorded an episode that I've forgotten how to speak. So despite the clumsy introduction, welcome to the show. Sheena O'Connell: Thank you. Thanks. Sean Tibor: Well, this week we're going to be talking about all of the amazing things that you are working on teaching on Prelude, the Guild of Educators, Pycon, South Africa, Django Con Africa. Some just amazing work that's happening on the other side of the world from us. And since I don't get to your side of the world very often, and I don't think Kelly. Actually, Kelly's been there more recently than I have on that hemisphere. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love to hear all about it. That hemisphere. Not that continent, though. Sheena O'Connell: Fresh enough? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Close enough. Right. Sean Tibor: Well, um, we're super excited to chat, and why don't we hop into the winds of the week, and then we'll have you introduce yourself to everyone after that. Sheena O'Connell: Okay. So, uh, winds of the week, I am busy running a course for Canonical, and I see it's on your show notes that we can talk about it. So it's a teacher. It is a teamwork course, and that's been going pretty well. So. So I've just started it, and yeah, it's been a very positive experience so far. I'm learning a ton as well. It's a, uh, pretty big team, and it's an international team, and so it is tricky on many, many levels. And then you want a fail of the week. You can see that we can do a fail. Oh, do you want to do your wins first? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, do a fail. We haven't done fails in a while, so go for it. Sheena O'Connell: Those plants, all of them fell onto that couch, and it was a hard day. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I sense a lot of vacuuming and sweeping happened during that day. Sheena O'Connell: Yes. Yes. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You want to. Sean Tibor: How about you, Kelly? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, you want to meet. So I just got back from Texas, San Antonio, luckily, before the, uh, floods, while they were occurring. But I didn't get caught up in them. M. I went to iste, which is the International Society for Technology Educators or something like that. A technological. But I did get to see a couple of people. I Got to give a side hug to Richard Culada who was on our show, which was really cool. He's the CEO of ISTI and ASCD because they've combined and I've seen saw a couple people that were on the show. I got to see Vicky Davis from 10 from the 10 Minute podcast and then I got to co host a podcast presentation with Faso Mendoza from My EdTech Life. And that was awesome. And it was just a good kind of time to see a lot of educators and let them talk about tech. And it's nice to be in a room where everyone's screaming and talking about AI and nobody really knows what they're talking about. I mean, they do know, but they don't know. Was a lot of questions asked while we were there. So it was pretty cool. Sheena O'Connell: That's always nice. Sean Tibor: And a fail this week. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh goodness. I know. Fail. No, I have lots of fails. It's summertime. I haven't been working on my. Anthony shaw has a GitHub course that he did at Pycon on the pre course and I was working my way through it and I got. I was like solidly for a week and I had a lot of things installed and then I haven't been back to the classroom and that's where my computer that I've been working on has all that stuff. So I feel like a big loser because I had all this momentum and I was training a whole bunch of different models and really getting to learn a lot. And now I'm gonna have to start again at zero because if you don't play with it, you forget about those things. So I feel that's a big fail. Sean Tibor: It's like pivot tables in Excel for me. If I don't use them at least once every few months, the next time I do it, I have to start over from the beginning. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Exactly, exactly. That's where I am. So you. Sean Tibor: I had an interesting experience because it was very much a self promoting sort of experience, which is not usually what I like to do at work. We've been doing a lot with AWS over the last few years and we've been doing a lot more recently with their AI coding agent, Amazon Q. Which is honestly pretty awesome. We've been using it really well across our team and there's a lot of good benefits to it. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse than others, who knows? But it works really well for us. And there's some really nice features that they've been coming out with. So their media relations team said, hey, you work for a big company and you're using our AI coding tool and we can promote that. Would you be interested in speaking to the press about um, your use of AI and our AI tool in particular? So I did an interview with an a ah writer for CIO Dive website and another one for Tech Strong TV which was a video podcast. So I got to use some of my podcasting skills that I've developed over the few years. So all that stuff got published and I am now quoted in articles and it was one of those surreal moments to see your name in print and it sparks severe imposter syndrome. But it was still pretty cool and got shared. A bunch of places, including the AWS newsroom, picked it up on LinkedIn and reposted it to all of their followers. So that was a cool moment and cool experience. And I think what I liked the most was that it was bringing all of the stuff that we've learned and done putting this podcast together into my professional life. And it was something that I couldn't have done before we started doing this podcast. So I felt pretty nice about that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I hope you have that tagged in there at Teaching Python when we re post uh, that, you know, Teaching Python with Sean. Sean Tibor: Worked that into the interview several times. I used to be a teacher and I co host a podcast but I think they wanted to focus just on the AI part. So next time. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh well, next time we'll get that. That's really cool. Hey, you have any fails? I know you like to do lots of fails. Sean Tibor: No, there's all kinds of fails. Things have been breaking left and right around the house. I had a moment over the weekend where the home server that runs all of the automations in the house lost its power supply. The power supply just got fried in a lightning storm. So nothing in the house is working. The lights are stuck on. Like none of the automations are happening. I realized that as much as I do for like disaster recovery at work, there's not really the same disaster recovery at home. So we're waiting for Amazon to save the day later this afternoon with a replacement power supply. Sheena O'Connell: In south, uh, Africa. We all have surge protectors on our plugs because the lightning storms are intense. Yeah, yeah. Sean Tibor: Oh, this got fried through us through a ups. Uh, so it was uh, substantial. It might have also just been equipment failure, but it happened right around the same time as a massive lightning storm. Sheena O'Connell: Okay. Wow. Gosh. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Was it some of your rigged Raspberry PI stuff? Sean Tibor: Nothing running on the Raspberry PI, but that was part of the what do I do next? Sort of thing. Should I try to hack something together that can at least let us turn the lights on and off again using a Raspberry PI? So far, we're gonna. We're gonna try the Amazon route next, and if that doesn't work, then we're going to Raspberry PI mode. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm sure you can hack it together or something. But I digress. Let's talk about Sheena, because we met you the education summit, but, uh, also at the workspace. What was it called? Like a side. Sean Tibor: Open Spaces. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Open Space. Thank you. Sheena O'Connell: Yep. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, yeah, tell us about. Just give us a little background about you yourself, how you've been coding, and because we didn't get to talk about you too much at pycon, we were just like, hug, hug, hug. Yes. Take me to Africa. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah. So me, I started coding kind of young, as a teenager. I think I was about 16 or so then I studied electrical engineering, but I just coded on the side for money, and I stuck with coding after that. And that was great. Always had a passion for education since I was a little kid. I was teaching the other little kids maths and things like that. Throughout my life, I would pick up skills, and then I would get a lot of joy from teaching those skills to other people. A few years into my career, quite some time in, I'd been working for a bunch of different startups and things like that because, uh, I don't really do that corporate life very well. It was really cool, but I was very, very fried and burned out. I got to a point where I was like, I don't want another job. I want to start a code school. And I was looking into doing this and looking at all of the different things that were required that were not teaching. Getting a telephone line, probably, and some desks and HR and all of that stuff. And I was like, wow, none of that sounds exciting. I just want to do the teaching part. And at that time, I was floating around doing freelance work and trying to find freelance clients and whatnot. I was trying to get in front of people a lot. I ran a workshop at pycon South Africa, and I made it free. You get to charge an amount. And I was just like, what's the minimum amount? Just get people into the room and I'll teach them stuff and then we'll see what happens. And because mine was free, it was full of students from an organization called Umuzi, which is a nonprofit in South Africa that trained people. They were like, hey, don't you want to run a workshop at, uh, our place? I was like, okay. So I did that and one thing led to another and I ended up working there and built out a bunch of different syllabuses for them. When I arrived, they had some web dev stuff and some data science stuff and they wanted data engineering stuff. I was like, oh, it's going to be tricky to teach in one year, but let's see what we can figure out. A lot of things needed a lot of polish. I was there for about five years. It was a really, really great place to learn about education because it was very alternative. It was a place where I was able to build things up from the ground up. I didn't need to stick to traditional mechanisms. It was a canvas and that was super cool because a lot of people were used to sage on the stage type teaching mechanisms and that doesn't really work for coding so much. Like you need to get people's hands on the keyboards. So I experimented a lot and I learned a lot and I learned a lot about modern signs of teaching and what works and how to get people to remember stuff that was cool and it worked really well. The students that we got would basically look for people with potential and then 12, uh, months later they would have a job and then they would get a, uh, promotion. They'd keep those jobs. And so it was very, very effective. And now more recently, I left there and I've started a new thing called Prelude, which is taking basically everything I have learned about education and I'm packaging it into different experiences that I think are useful. I mostly teach grownups. In fact, I 100% teach grownups. I run a bunch of mostly Django related mini courses. I call them Learning Sprints. It's advanced skills. It's not let's learn from the ground up. It's okay, you're a professional and you want to get really good at this or you want to know how to get these technologies to play nice. That's been really, really cool. That's the main thing I do with Prelude was the technical training. But I found a real need for soft skills training as well. So when I feel like I've been talking for a long time, so if you want to interrupt me, please do. Uh, when I was at Umwazi, I started off focusing entirely on technical stuff because it's like, cool, they're here to learn how to program. As I interacted with the students more and more and as I focused on the fact that they were actually like they were aiming at getting jobs like that is why they were with us. Uh, they needed a career. They needed a lot more than coding skills. They needed the soft skills. We put a lot of emphasis on training that. How do you make a person into a, uh, professional? How do you make a person into the kind of person who will enter a new team and make their team slightly better? You can do that from the bottom, but it's tricky. A lot of it comes down to just setting people up with good timing sometimes, but also awareness of certain things and an attitude around setting the people around them up for success instead of just looking after their own bits. So, yeah, it was interesting. Sean Tibor: So when you got went into the soft skills part of that, how much of that felt like teaching versus coaching? And I'm curious to know how you would distinguish between the two when you hear it. Position that way. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah, I would say it was more like coaching a lot of the time, because you could tell a person like, this is what you should do. They wouldn't necessarily always do it. So, for example, if a student showed up late for a thing consistently, or they didn't show up at all consistently, this is a thing that it would happen. And it's partially a cultural thing. You've grown up in a place where nobody around you is, like, professional, and the needs of your family come first. Then sometimes you'll say, oh, I can't come to school today because my uncle needs help at the shop. You'd have to sit with people and say, yeah, your uncle's really important, we understand, but if you did this at your job, you would get fired. That would really be wasteful. So let's figure out how to not do that. It was a lot around just practicing those professional skills. The way I started thinking about it was the best way to get somebody to show up like a professional is to build a professional environment, hold people to certain standards, and then they start to hold themselves to that standard as well. So it's tricky. It's really tricky because in South Africa we've got this thing called Ubuntu, not the operating system, the other one. It's basically like I am, because we are. It's about, um, looking after the collective. The folks that we were training for the most part, were very embedded in a social fabric that didn't necessarily even understand what we were doing. It's challenging because you don't really want to pull people away from their cultural background. But it's also, hey, you're here for a reason. And this is the Kind of success that you want. So we're going to need to adapt. So it was weird. Yeah, Tricky. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm going to jump in real quick because I have so many thoughts of writing down things. So I like this. I am. Because we are saying, and I've heard Jay actually had said that one time about, uh, Ubuntu, but I'm thinking like this soft skills. So you're training these soft skills, and these are all these things that, uh, in the lower levels, because you work with adults and the lower levels, in the younger years, we. We're having this massive conversation going on, like, how do we keep the humanity in things? How do we teach what's now important? And so this morning I was reading something where they're not necessarily going to be bringing in junior interns in coding because the junior interns don't have anything to show except for the fact that they can vibe code or they can produce something with prompt engineering. The whole article is, what is it that you're bringing to the table? That's the interesting part of those soft skills. You were talking about bringing in the professional. Say we had to list out some five top soft skills. What would you say are, like, some things that we could. Cause this is a lifelong learning skill. You don't just say, hey, I'm going to teach you in a workshop a, uh, soft skill. It's like something you actually have to practice. So what would be like five top soft skills that you think are the most important going into the. And Sean can weigh that out because he has interns as well, and he can compare his list. Sheena O'Connell: Okay. It's hard to pick a top five. But off the top of my head, being able to ask for help, well, I think that's a, uh, hell of a skill check. Sean Tibor: That's on my list too. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah. If you said, if you set the person helping you up for success when you ask them a question, then you'll get more help. On the flip side of that is helping, uh, other people on the junior level, you don't typically need to do that, but there are times. So I suppose that's something that you need to learn a bit about later on. Showing up on time. That's a big one. That's really a big one. Communicating about difficulties. So it's like, this is going to be late. I'm sorry. Here are the reasons. Communicating upfront instead of waiting until it's a, uh, disaster or a disappointment. What else? I think something that I've seen a lot of juniors do is show off and write the fanciest, fanciest code possible to be like, look how fancy I am. I can write such fancy code. And it's like, nobody can read your code, write simple code. So there's a lot of just, like, best, uh, practices around. You're not here to show all. You're here to write code that works well with other people's stuff. It is a technical skill, but it's also a soft skill in a way, because it's like you want your code to be able to communicate with people. Good code, it makes its intentions clear to the people who read it. That's quite helpful. So that goes down into the clean code realm. But it's useful from a soft skills perspective. What else can I tell you that's off the top of my head? I'll, um, need to think a little bit. Sean, why don't you have a go? Sean Tibor: One that I know that we often emphasize a lot with our junior engineers is having a well defined problem, right? Because we often will encounter problems that we only see the initial shape of it from a bug or an error or some need that someone can't quite articulate. And so helping them through that process and it's. It is a soft skill and a technical skill at the same time. Because it's not just about the hard analysis that you can do of error logs and traces and figuring out what the problem is from that. It's also the asking questions and trying to understand not just what the problem is, but what are some potential causes for that, what could be potential solutions, what are other constraints or considerations. So there's a lot of work that they have to do to elicit all of that response from all the people involved and finding the way to coach them through that so that they can ask those questions without being annoying or exhausting or repetitive is often quite challenging. Sheena O'Connell: Okay, that's big. Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: What else? I think that also goes in maybe with team, uh, skills. You're going into that new course, right. That's also a big soft skill. Right. Learning how to work in a team. Sheena O'Connell: Or so the stuff I was focusing on at Umuzi was like a lot of very foundational soft skills. So things like showing up on time and whatnot. So this is for a team of working professionals who are already, like, doing good stuff, and it's more about amplifying what they're already doing rather than say, I'm going to come in and fix the team. So the way that works is start off by seeing what the issues are. And if there are issues and seeing where their frustrations are, the differences between people. So we started off by asking a lot of questions and running a survey just to get an idea in a few different ways. So a lot of that's based on a thing called the Aristotle project by Google for the listeners. It's Google's, uh, very big. And they have lots of teams and they wanted their teams to do better. And so they studied, like many, many, many people themselves, just to figure out how to work with their own teams. They got organizational psychologists involved and things like that. Very robust. And it's very hard to nail down, like, what makes an effective team. Like effective is such a fluffy word. But different teams had different definitions of that. And the teams that they studied were generally cross functional teams and sometimes cross cultural teams as well. They came up with a couple of different things were very, very important. So number one is psychological safety. If a team has problems with psychological safety, then there's a couple of things that you can do to address that, and that is, firstly, teach them about why it's important they can give people different kinds of communication skills. So things like nonviolent communication and active listening are very, very important. There's also a lot of cultural differences. There's a really good book called the Culture Map. Yeah, culture map. And it talks about different spectrums, I suppose, or different axes along which different cultures differ. So if you've got a bunch of people of different cultures in a room and you want to see how they'll interact, like, you can research every culture individually or you can say, all right, how can we measure them against each other? What axes would we use? There are things around communication style and how people deliver feedback and how people deal with hierarchy and things like that. Like, some cultures are more hierarchical, some people are less, um, and that's fine. It's just when you put them together, then they don't understand each other and they come to strange conclusions. On the psychological safety side, for example, you get some cultures who are very direct with negative feedback. They'll just tell you in front of everyone. If they have something to say about your mom, they will tell you in front of everyone. And in some cultures, that would be a slap in the face. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That reminds me of my first day, my first week teaching in the UK. I didn't realize the sarcasm from M. An 8th grader. I about sent him to the moon. I was like, excuse me, but it's very interesting if you don't understand a culture and you're trying to work even as a teacher, Student situation. That is huge. Uh, just stopping you on the psychological safety from iste. We had a gentleman. His name is Mr. Lindsay. Okay. Mr. Lindsay is a TikTok famous teacher. He is a math eal. If you look at, um, him, all he does is talk about brain rotation and he helps all the teachers understand what skibidi Ohio. I met this guy and I thought, okay, he's famous for TikTok. But when he got up on the stage, he was a pastor and he was talking about the fact of connecting and safety. Really, how do you make connections? Because that's the first part of working in a team. If I don't understand you, if I don't connect with you, if I don't feel safe with you, why would I learn from you? Why would I want to work with you? Why would I want to give anything to you? So it was a, uh, cool observation. You have to feel safe in your environment. You have to feel worthy of speaking up, and you have to be okay with the fact of if I do speak up, you're not going to make fun of me. So that's a neat correlation between adults and also kids. Sheena O'Connell: Yes, yes. And there's a lot of things that work well in the education space that are also really worth paying attention to in the organizational space. There's another thing called stereotypes rate. So basically, if somebody is a member of some kind of underrepresented group and they struggle in some way, then they are prone to being biased against themselves a little bit and saying, oh, it must be because I'm, um, this. And if you remind them of that group, then it's like some of their mental bandwidth is taken up in considering this anxiety that they have instead of fully working on the task, and it damages people's performance. This has been studied quite a lot in educational settings. We can do these things in order to reduce stereotype threat. Uh, we should do that at work, too, because we have the same problems in the working world. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I catch myself saying this, but I have two boys. I don't have two girls or anything. But I'm always. I always hear this in the back of my head when my son cries. I hear, stop being a girl. And that was something that I grew up with. Stop being such a girl. I'm like, really? I am one of the strongest men, most bullish girls out there. And I keep hearing that still in my head. Stop being a girl. Stop being girl. So that's like a typical stereotype. And that's one of the things that A lot of the coding world has been doing well at getting more girls into code, and it's not just a girl thing. And that stereotype is not there. So, yeah, a hundred percent education and adult life. Sheena O'Connell: Yes. Yeah. Sean Tibor: It's amazing how difficult it is to separate those two concepts also, because without psychological safety, the problem of stereotype threat is exacerbated and amplified. It also calls into sharp relief the need for resilience and wisdom as well. I was thinking about this the other day. I was hearing from a friend that I used to work with that they had an intern that came in and the intern said something that was a little bit insensitive the person. And this was early on, and the person hearing it took offense. What was missing from the interaction was the moment to stop and say, wait, let's talk about this, let's think about this. Why did this happen? How do we fix this? It went straight from insensitive to hurt. What I was hoping for in that interaction was the moment to say, we're going to stop for a moment and we're going to talk about this and we're going to figure out why it happened and create that sense of safety and reduce the threat, because now it'll be a place where we can talk through it. And so you, in order to do that, you need to have the wisdom to recognize the moment when it's happening or soon after it's happened, and the resiliency to bounce back from. I'm feeling hurt, but there's an opportunity to learn something here. And sometimes it's easier said than done. There's a variety of impact there that people can feel. But to me, that was. When you blend all these things together, especially when you're talking about more advanced soft skills for working professionals, sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own background, our own story, the things that are happening, things happening outside of work, that we lose sight of that moment to stop and take a time out and say, we're going to learn from what just happened here and create more safety instead of reducing it. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah, I think that's powerful. One of the ways I explain getting good at things in general is it's about, uh, firstly, becoming aware of what you need to do, and then it's about doing those things, and you need to get both of these. And people often skip the awareness. They're too caught up in their emotions at the time, as you said, or caught up in where they're going next. That pause is a big deal. It feels maybe inefficient. In the moment, but it adds a lot of leverage in a lot of ways. It also builds connection with people. If you are. If somebody did insult you or do something insensitive or do something harmful and you have a constructive conversation with them, then you can often become closer as people and understand each other better. Uh, it's positive. There's another thing we're thinking about. There was a study. I don't remember the details of it, but basically, there are some teams that are intelligent teams, and there are some teams that are less intelligent teams. And you can take a group of, like, very clever people and make a really dumb team out of them. And that's quite possible if your team members aren't paying attention to each other well. And plugged into what each other's motivations and experiences are. One of the ways to make a dumb team into a clever team is by adding more women because they tend to be more emotionally aware. The other way is to just build emotional awareness and build awareness of how other people work. And if you find these small points of friction and you highlight it and you say, look, this is friction. Friction isn't bad. It just means, like, there's friction, and we should probably look at it. That really helps the team to be smarter as a group. Sean Tibor: Sometimes it's okay to be intentionally disruptive and provocative with this as long as there's the support behind it. So as a team leader or as someone who's coming into a team, you know, if you have that sense of support and safety, whether you're the one providing it or the one receiving it, you have the opportunity to shake up some of the strictures that have come into place in the team. That reorganization, when it happens, leads often to more intelligent teams that are more productive and work better together. Sheena O'Connell: That's huge. Good. That's. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I want to talk some more about this Aristotle because I think there's so many good nuggets in here, and I. I want to thank you for bringing that back up to our attention. But I'm looking at those five, whatever they're called. Five factors or four factors. Right. Psychological safety was the one that you were touching on. That's like, number one. But then they start talking dependability, structure, clarity, meaning, and impact. And this goes back to your soft skill and having a reason for a project. Maybe Sean was saying, to have a defined problem and having meaning and making an impact. There's a lot of takes that you can bring into a K12 classroom. Because this goes into that conversation about agency. I know. I'm m so sorry about throwing AI in, but that's like my whole life right now. All these teachers, teachers, everyone's out there. Why would a kid want to do work? Why would someone want to do an easy code when AI can do it or whatever. There's that reason of. And they have it meaning. Work is personally important to team members and impact the team members think their work matters and creates change that 4 and 5. Why are you doing anything as a team? It has to have a meaning. The same thing about learning Python. Sean told me first when I would get in a rut, he's like, find a project. Find something that's meaningful. Then you're going to want to learn X about Python. That's something that we've always promoted. It's very funny that we still transfer that into adulthood. Meaning we didn't get it right in K12. So what are we going to do about that? I mean like, hello. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And we're expecting teachers to do it for, for middle schoolers. Go ahead. I'll let you have some thought on that because you're teaching this with adults. Sheena O'Connell: So there's a couple of different exercises that you can do, but the project Aristotle. Ah, uh, four factors. They list them out in the order of importance. So psychological safety is most important thing because everything else stems from that. So dependability is the next one. And um, if you don't feel psychologically safe enough to say, I'm not going to hit that deadline, I can't do that here is an unpopular opinion, then chances are dependability is also going to start to be a problem. Some of the dependability comes from like the ability to push back on things a lot of the time. Psychological, like I've seen psychological safety being implemented badly where it's just like you don't get to say negative things. That's not psychological safety, that's something else. If you're in a place where you are able to really state the facts and talk about your weaknesses and things that you're like, oh, uh, I don't think I can do that. I think I need help. People become more dependable and they can depend on each other more. This is almost a side effect. There are certain processes and whatnot that can help with that. So one of the challenges with teamwork training is like you can train the team, you can't train the process, but you can train the team to look at the process with a certain lens and then give them the tools to communicate and sort things out. If they are working in a place where Requests for different tasks come from all four corners of everything. Then it's like, okay, cool. Clearly you need some way of managing it. What do you guys think? How can you figure it out? So you don't necessarily solve all of the problems, but, uh, give them the tools to see this is an issue and we can in fact fix it. The other thing with that is trying to fix everything at the same time usually doesn't work. Giving people a mindset around, uh, work is learning and we're doing experiments. That's also very, very helpful from a dependability point of view. You don't say like it's an experiment, so you can give up at any point. It's not a game, but you can try different things and see what works. And that is very, very helpful. And the next one's structure and clarity. That's also something that once people are dependable, then suddenly what's going to happen next? Suddenly things become predictable. That's very, very helpful. Meaning is mostly around personal meaning. Am I growing as a human being? Am I in line with the work? So this is something that's easier to not really train for, but to look at and to get people to look at. One thing to do on that front is just to get people to examine their own value structures and say, what actually matters to you as a human being? How do these values show up in your life generally? And how do these values show up in your work? So that's a big part of it, just that level of self awareness. There's things about growth as well. People are aware of each other's abilities and what they want to grow in and what growth would be useful in the organization. Then you can say, cool, this task is going to be a bit of a stretch for you. Let me know if you need something. And that's very helpful. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Uh, that's going to be a slight tie in with the mindset as well. They talk about that a lot in the education. Are you got that fixed mindset or you have that growth mindset? Are you up, uh, for challenges? What do you value? For example, most coach coders, maybe I'm grouping us, but most coders are really lifelong learners. They're problem seekers. They like to solve the problems. They say that we have this growth mindset. If we don't know what's happening, we're going to go to. Well, we used to go to Stack Overflow. We'd go to the documentation. Now we just go to Amazon. Q. I'll plug that for AWS for you, Sean. That's an interesting value to think about. How are you as a worker? How are you as a learner? How are you as a person on a team? What do you consider? Because I guess if you're going to what Sean says, asking questions, and what you guys asking for help as well, that's something you value. The fact that I want to be able to ask questions without someone thinking I'm dumb. I think you need to do that. Sheena O'Connell: There's something else that sometimes masquerades as growth mindset that I saw a lot with the students at Umuzi, and it's probably something that gets seen a lot at work as well. It ties into psychological safety as well. I don't think it has a name. I call it the desperation mindset. Sean's nodding. I think, you know, like, I don't want to be. Maybe. Yeah. So if you have somebody and you give them an opportunity and it's cool now, your job is to do this thing, then they can often take it as, if I don't do this thing freaking perfectly, I'm going to lose this opportunity. Then they start hiding a little bit. They don't want to show weakness. I don't want to show that I'm struggling. I'm going to hide over here or make excuses and nonsense like that. Sean Tibor: And that's also where they oversolve the problem too, right? Sheena O'Connell: Yeah, yeah. Sean Tibor: If you don't check in with them, they spiral downward into this, like, whole mess of extra credit, basically. Well, I tried this and it was pretty good. But then I found like I needed to fix this one thing. So I went off on this whole other tangent because they're trying to over solve the problem, but you solved it already. You hit the finish line that goes back to that you, uh, know, defining the problem. What are we actually trying to do? What does done look like? It is a complex thing, as you mentioned. It's not something where it's, oh, I didn't know that that was the finish line. It's also the I want to go above and beyond sometimes in a work setting. Above and beyond in that way is not helping yourself or others. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah, yeah. It's a tricky balance to have because you don't really want to tell people, don't go above and beyond, but there's a time and a place. Sean Tibor: One of the things we do also is show them what that looks like. So sometimes over delivering is a good thing because you've recognized some facet of the problem that the people presenting it didn't even realize that they had or were going to have, then it can also turn into, I've made this unnecessarily complex solution because I wanted to make sure I had considered every eventuality. Sheena O'Connell: It's difficult. I suppose the crux is really like being able to see the bigger picture and how does it in fact fit into the bigger picture. That takes a bit of experience and wisdom and experience in the system that you're in, in the team that you're in, working on the project that you're working on. You don't necessarily know the longer term effects of your actions when you're new to things. I suppose that's uh, like knowing when to over engineer and knowing when to go down that rabbit hole. Those are things that come with quite a bit of experience. Sean Tibor: As I like to also remind people, most of our experience is won by making horrible mistakes and having to clean up classes afterwards. That's one of the things I remind them. M. Kelly, when I was teaching, you heard me say this a few times because the students would invariably compare themselves to the way I coded. Oh, Mr. Tyber can just sit there and write python code at 60 words per minute and he knows exactly where it's going to go and what it's going to do. And Kelly, you were doing this too, especially after the second or third year, you'd be able to write the example code without having to think about it or having it ready. And they would look at this and they would have this moment where they're like, oh, I can't do that, I'll never be able to do that. I would remind them. This works, uh, equally as well in a work environment and team environment. It's unfair to compare yourself where you are now to where I am now because what you haven't seen is the 25 years of banging my head against the keyboard, having those oh, no moments where things blow up, taking production systems offline, all of those hard won lessons that result, in my experience. So really the only true comparison is to your former self, to who you were before and how much you've grown since then. If we can remind them of that, maybe that'll help with some of the growth mindset failures. Because it's not so much about comparing yourself to what's possible or what you I would do or someone else would do. It's more about what have I done today that I wasn't able to do five years ago or two years ago or last week. Sheena O'Connell: Yes, yes. Like when I look at my old code, I get very embarrassed, but that is universal. Sean Tibor: Same people. Sheena O'Connell: Should I get you? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's funny. Sean Tibor: I know we have a few minutes left. I wanted to come back. I have one final thought, and Kelly, I'm sure you have one also. Why don't you go first and I'll save mine for the very end. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, no. Oh. I was going to switch topics real quick because I really wanted to talk real quick about Pycon Africa, because I want you to give an opportunity for all of our Southern Hemisphere people and those on the actual content continent of Africa. I was in South America, so it's a long way away. Let's talk for Pycon Africa and Django. You have something coming up for Django, too. Sheena O'Connell: Awesome. Yeah. So I'm going to Django Kwan Africa. I'm not organizing it that it is happening in Arusha, Tanzania, so it's very close to Kilimanjaro. You actually fly into the Kilimanjaro airport and it's going to be cool. This is the second Django Con Africa, and the, uh, first one was fantastic. I'm very much looking forward to that. And that's in August. Then Pycon Africa. Pycon Africa has been going for a longer time, and it floats around the continent and visits different countries this year in South Africa. So it's in my hometown, Johannesburg. I'm chairing it, which I'm excited about, and it's terrifying. Pretty cool. So far, the team is solid. So what can I tell you about it? It is in October, early October. We have some workshops, we have, uh, two days of talks, we have two days of sprints. So it's a format that most Python people are pretty familiar with. The other cool thing about it is it's in Africa. So I. I'm grateful that I get to travel as much as I do. So I get to go to a lot of different conferences around the world, and it's super cool. And whenever I'm out and about, people ask where I'm from and I say, I'm from South Africa. And they get all excited about that and they're like, oh, Africa, awesome. Would you like to go to Africa? Most people say they want to go and visit Africa, but they don't. Uh, but it's generally, as a tourist, visiting a conference would be more awesome because you can always tourist afterwards. But you can tourist with the benefit of knowing some local nerds and making friends and interacting with the local community in a way that gives you real connections, like, real lasting connections. South Africa is a pretty good place. It's worth a visit. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And you guys are having an education summit? Sheena O'Connell: Unfortunately not. Not enough capacity for some to organize it. But I would very much like to do it in the future. But we do typically have quite a few solid educators at the conference talking about education. It is a good place for educators. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That'Ll be on a bucket list there. Kelly and Sean, South Africa or in Africa? Pycon Africa. Sheena O'Connell: Yes. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Maybe in 20, 20, 26. Something on our do list. Sheena O'Connell: Yeah. So I don't know if Pycon Africa will be in, um, South Africa again next year. Not 100% nailed down, but Pycon South Africa happens in South Africa every year and it's pretty awesome. That was my first Python conference and it started a, um, lot of things for me. So this is close to my heart. Very cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sean, you wanted to ask something? Sean Tibor: All right, so my last question was coming back to the concept of Ubuntu, and I'm curious to get your perspective on this because in many ways, especially in the us, programming can be a solitary pursuit as a career. It can be very introverted, and it's something that people take on in order to further their own individual career growth. So it's not about us, it's about me, and it's about my career and doing the thing that I am passionate about and I'm good at. And in many ways, it helps select people who are internally motivated and intrinsically driven. It also makes it sometimes difficult to find ways to help those people become part of a team and work together and take that sense of self and self growth and turn that into team and team growth, not because they don't want to, but because the skills are different and the motivations are different In a culture where Ubuntu is a real concept because it has a name and it has tangible expressions of that concept, do you see the same sort of expression of self in people who want to take on a software development career where it's about them, or do they bring that sense of Ubuntu with them? And how does that affect their growth as a developer? Sheena O'Connell: I think it depends a lot. So South Africa's. We call ourselves the Rainbow Nation because it is a very diverse place. We've got 11 official languages. It's too much official languages. Uh, we have a bunch of different cultures in South Africa and people bring those cultures with them to work. So there are aspects of Ubuntu where I've seen it with the people that I've worked with, for example. So we would train students and then we would hire the ones that were like the most. The ones with the teachers hearts, who knew their stuff. Sean Tibor: Right. Sheena O'Connell: And then they would help out. And that was pretty wonderful. And you could see how they would interact with each other. If somebody was stuck, then somebody would help. There'd always be somebody around who would help the students. With the other students as well were people who really took on a lot. They wanted to take on a teaching role. Even when they just started, they'd be like, oh, this person's stuck. I don't really know how to help them, but I'm gonna see if I can try. And that was really lovely. It varies a lot. You do get people who are very individualistic also. If somebody comes from somewhere quite rural and then they end up getting a hit with a corporate job, then they don't quite fit in. They can then become more individualistic in that setting because it's like my people are back there. That spirit of Ubuntu can be expressed differently in different places. One thing that's quite interesting about that, though, people with means, we can solve our problems by paying money to make those problems go away. Something is wrong with the plumbing. You call the plumber, or you call an electrician, or you take your car to the mechanic, or you need childcare, you pay for childcare. If you're in a community that doesn't have that, then it's more of a community because you have to rely on the people around you. So something that I've found, I think it's like a study thing, but I'm not actually certain. But folks who come from communities with less means that have to rely on each other more, uh, they tend to be, like, more emotionally aware, more interpersonally aware, and, like, just calmer with each other. It's because, uh, if you're used to, like, paying professionals to get the thing done and then they didn't do the thing, you're like, what? What if you're getting your, like, neighbor to help you, then your reaction will be quite different. So there's a lot more patience, which is also very interesting. Yeah, so it's. It brings a different set of emotional skills and cultural skills. Sean Tibor: Yeah, nice. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very interesting, Nice. So much to ask, but we have so little time. 54. We aimed for 45 and we get 54. This is usually what happens. Uh, do you have any other questions, Sean? Sean Tibor: No. This is a good place to wrap up and say thank you to Sheena for joining us today. I'm so glad that we met you at Pycon and had the opportunity to make this connection and make this podcast happen and hopefully many more like it. Sheena O'Connell: Thank you so much. It was lovely to be here. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And if people want to reach out to you and find out more, maybe about team development or all the other great things. We didn't even touch on the fact that you teach people how to teach and all that other stuff, so I think that's great. Where can they reach you? Sheena O'Connell: Cool. So I have a personal blog at sheenaoc,1word.com, so it's Sheena Ock for O'. Connell, and then my courses and stuff you can find on Prelude tv. Currently, I'm not running any workshops because the teamwork training is keeping me very busy, as is Pipeline Africa. But in a couple of months, I'll be kicking that off again. You can join a waiting list or you can get in touch with me if you need to through either of those places. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Perfect. Perfect. And that's it then. Sean Tibor: Kelly, do we have any announcements this week? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I have no announcements. I'm not going to make any promises, but Sean and I are supposed to do some more recording. I have a whole bunch of people lined up. We'll just see if it happens. And I'm not going to break. I'm not going to break any promises, but we have a lot of high hopes. Sheena O'Connell: Okay. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: John? Sean Tibor: No, nothing from my side. I'm looking forward to getting some things done this summer and getting more content put out there. I really enjoyed doing all of the video posts that we did together around AI and education. So looking to identify the next series that we create and publish, because that was a lot of fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: There's still so much to share. It's like, I would have kept it up, but I was finding the pattern of doing that every day. That was definitely a hard thing to do. Sean Tibor: Yeah, we made some good progress. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, we did. Excellent. Sean Tibor: All right, why don't we wrap up here then, and we'll, uh, get ready for the next episode next week. So I'll sign off by saying, for teaching Python, this is Sean and this. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Is Kelly signing off. Sheena O'Connell: Sam.