But anyway, this modern Age of AI has made me busier than ever. The building-focused, challenge-based methodology that I piloted this summer is gaining traction with teams across all our geos. I've rebranded my AI companion tool, which worked beautifully (much to my surprise), and now I'm working on new backend dev to automate more components so it can be used at scale. I continue to learn a lot in the process.
There is a moderately scary piece to this, as we are piloting an instructor-less approach for two European cohorts (one full of interns, the other full-time architects). Oh no, if it works, who will need Todd? But that's kind of okay because I'm actually going to be teaching more than I did in the summer for the new North American cohort I kicked off yesterday, and there still is a great appreciation for the value of human-based training and social learning in most quarters. How I show up is changing, but I'm still alive and kicking for a while longer.
Also, all of this is intentional on my part. Before the big reorg that killed my legacy training program (TechU), my boss asked me about my preferences as to what my role might look like after things got shaken up. I naturally still want to teach, but part of teaching for me has always been about exploring new ways to create a good learning environment, so I told her that I'd prefer to continue doing innovative work as opposed to just yammering on podium until I die.
Ultimately things worked out the way I'd hoped, and I'm being pulled into a lot of interesting projects (and some fucking tedious ones, too, lol). If I might brag a bit, I had a meeting last week with the cofounder, CTO, and CEO of our lab platform vendor because they were very interested in what I've been building, and it looks like we'll be partnering with them to really raise the bar on how to give our learners more practical and engaging building experiences, as opposed to the type of rote, step-by-step exercises that I've fought against my entire career.
I'm also still doing Thursdays with Todd sessions for my re/Start learners, which is a true joy because they are an awesome, hungry audience, and I essentially have carte blanche to do whatever I want at this point. I increased access to the classes by recording them (which was previously verboten) to enable folks on the other side of the world to tune in without having to be up at like 2am local time, and I built out a distribution process (with the help of Amazon Quick) which itself made for a great class session about things like Content Delivery Networks and whatnot. The last several weeks I've been riffing off learner questions about AI/ML to deliver a series of deep dives into model training and deployment, building apps, security and ethics, etc.
Looks like I might even get elevated permissions in the aforementioned lab platform so I can fix some stale exercises that are not completely working (always risky to let Todd touch production, but I see exactly what needs doing and the blast radius is small). Those have been great teaching opportunities, where we go well beyond the instructions to troubleshoot and work around the problems, discuss what we could do to make them function properly and how difficult maintenance really is, etc, but it would be nice if they just did what they are supposed to do (another age-old complaint).
On the home front, other than being sick, my highschoolers are highschoolin'. Sadie is locked in. Sam turns seventeen (17!) on Tuesday, and he had going to the Seahawks game next Sunday on his birthday list, so we're doing that. The house is a fucking disaster area, but at least it's safe and quiet.
Boy, am I tired.
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