On Teaching Skills

Over the last few weeks my friend Mark Needham and I talked about a different approach to teaching Neo4j.

We read and discussed Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra which is a real gold mine (like her ex-blog) and also discussed things like Microhabits, the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, Flow and much more.

The idea is not to just pour information over people, like we did in the past, but rather to enable and support the growth of real skills.

So:

For someone to become an badass graph (database) user we have to help them acquire the skills, both by teaching and by improving Neo4j.

Some aspects that Kathy focuses on:

  • breakdown of skills into smaller, more managable ones

  • learn a basic set of skills fast to be able to do stuff

  • use deliberate practise to maximize small skills within a short time

  • don’t have too many mediocre skills

  • show a growth path, what can you do with X

  • create an environment that fosters the skills you want to have

  • tell the truth: it’s hard, everyone struggled with this, it’s going to be better

  • be there to help, or provide means if you can’t be there

  • remove fear of breaking things, encourage experimentation

  • focus on the compelling context (understanding and handling connected data), not the tool (graph database aka Neo4j)

What would that mean for us? Some ideas:

  • Foster more exploration (Neo4j Browser, Guides, Refcard)

  • You can’t break anything (Query killing, Show how to reset the database)

  • Focus on real world tasks and exercises (still small enough to comprehend)

  • Understand and internalize core concepts (graph thinking, patterns)

  • Quicker to useful skills / results (able to do stuff in 10 or 30 mins)

  • Master smaller skills faster

  • Don’t teach bad skills (global graph queries, match/merge node w/o index, no limit, cartesian product)

  • Let them run into problems firsthand, teach how to solve them

  • Eagerly use Query Plan Viz to highlight issues (typos, missing indexes, cartesian products, high db-hits, high cardinalities)

  • Use the Cypher Refcard and a FAQ much more for self-help

  • Short route to Create & Share (GraphGist) and iterate

  • Show also mid- and large size imports

  • Point out config and tuning (page-cache, heap, disk-perf)

Based on our findings I started to create a new type of "Neo4j Workshop", which is much more focused on practise, acquiring skills, applying them and enabling people to be self-sustaining.

Here is the first draft, I’d love if you could give us some feedback on it:

Draft "Neo4j Workshop"