Learning is essential, but... It's easy to fall into a learning fatigue. It can feel like one more thing in our already overflowing to-do list. To make matters more challenging, the number of online resources to learn from is growing daily.
Marie Cruz is a Senior Developer Advocate: her job is to learn and share what she has learned. In this episode, Lina talks to Marie about creating the habit of continuous learning in this busy world. You'll get a chance to learn from some of the best Marie's tips and resources on approaching your learning journeys better.
Find Marie on:
Mentions and resources:
Links to books are to Amazon and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
If you liked this episode, you may as well enjoy these past episode of Quality Bits:
Learning Culture, Collaboration, and Experiments with Andrei Bechet https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/14182594
Performance Testing with Nicole van der Hoeven
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/13909242
Follow Quality Bits host Lina Zubyte on:
Follow Quality Bits on your favorite listening platform and Twitter: https://twitter.com/qualitybitstech to stay updated with future content.
If you like this podcast and would like to support its making, feel free to buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/linazubyte
Thank you for listening! ✨
Learning is essential, but... It's easy to fall into a learning fatigue. It can feel like one more thing in our already overflowing to-do list. To make matters more challenging, the number of online resources to learn from is growing daily.
Marie Cruz is a Senior Developer Advocate: her job is to learn and share what she has learned. In this episode, Lina talks to Marie about creating the habit of continuous learning in this busy world. You'll get a chance to learn from some of the best Marie's tips and resources on approaching your learning journeys better.
Find Marie on:
Mentions and resources:
Links to books are to Amazon and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
If you liked this episode, you may as well enjoy these past episode of Quality Bits:
Learning Culture, Collaboration, and Experiments with Andrei Bechet https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/14182594
Performance Testing with Nicole van der Hoeven
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/13909242
Follow Quality Bits host Lina Zubyte on:
Follow Quality Bits on your favorite listening platform and Twitter: https://twitter.com/qualitybitstech to stay updated with future content.
If you like this podcast and would like to support its making, feel free to buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/linazubyte
Thank you for listening! ✨
00:00:05 Lina Zubyte
Hi everyone, welcome to Quality Bits, a podcast about building high quality products and teams. I'm your host, Lina Zubyte. Learning is such an important part of our everyday life, yet so frequently we find ourselves too busy or overwhelmed when it comes to it. In this episode, I'm talking to Marie Cruz, a Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. You're going to learn more about what this role entails, and that it's a lot about learning. So as a person who works a lot with everyday learning, Marie has some tips to help you out how to learn better and to choose resources that you would like to learn from. Enjoy this conversation.
00:00:59
Hello, Marie. I'm so excited to have you here with me. Welcome to Quality Bits!
00:01:05 Marie Cruz
Thank you, Lina. And I am so happy to be a guest in this wonderful podcast, so I'm really happy that you invited me.
00:01:15 Lina Zubyte
Could you shortly introduce yourself?
00:01:17 Marie Cruz
Sure. So my name is Marie Cruz. I currently work as a Senior Developer Advocate for a company called Grafana Labs. Prior to this, I've been in software testing for over 10 years, so I did a career switch from software testing to Developer Advocacy, which is something that really suits my personal situation currently, but I still enjoy software testing. As much as possible I still try to help our team with any testing related questions that they have and I'm still quite active in the testing community. So I speak at events that I've been part of. And yeah, just really sharing my love of learning to everyone.
00:02:05 Lina Zubyte
What does it mean to be a developer advocate? What does this role entail?
00:02:10 Marie Cruz
Yeah, it's really funny that you ask this question, so I'll start off with the back story because last week I actually went to speak at my daughter's school and I had to explain to them what software testing and what developer advocacy is. They were a bunch of really curious six to seven year olds. But I know I had to change the way I explained what developer advocacy is so something that they can really understand. So, in simplest terms, the way I would explain the better for advocacy is I teach people cool stuff. I teach people things that I've learned. I share any recommended practises. At the moment I'm currently learning a lot about observability, so my focus at the moment is sharing beginner friendly content, beginner friendly video tutorials or written content about observability. But I also teach people a lot about performance testing recommended practises, whether that's in the front end or in the back end. So, in summary, yeah, I get to share to people what I learned so that they can also be in the same position that I am in, so for them to also learn about a particular new tool or new technology. Because there's a lot of stuff that we have to learn: technology, the different concepts, it just keeps on increasing and increasing. There's a lot of things for us to learn. So yeah, that's essentially what I do as a developer advocate.
00:03:48 Lina Zubyte
So basically your role is to learn?
00:03:52 Marie Cruz
Yeah, to learn to share and to basically connect to the community, yeah.
00:03:58 Lina Zubyte
Amazing, however, also for some people a little bit scary because you may be in a testing industry for 10 years, and you may feel like a senior or an expert. And then you start from scratch and you learn things. How is it for you? Do you need to learn continuously new things?
00:04:19 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I was definitely in this situation not too long ago. So like I said, my focus at the moment is with the observability and that to me is such a vast area that I haven't really learned in that like much more detail. Whereas testing has always been my comfort zone, like my passion, you could say. So changing focus... and I also was recently promoted to a senior developer advocate, the Imposter syndrome really kicked in cause in my head, I'm like OK, Now I have to teach people about something that I'm not too familiar with, and all the assumptions of being a senior, like we all probably have that assumption that hey, you're a senior, you should know about this stuff already, but actually it's quite humbling because even if you're a senior, even if you're a principal engineer or whatever, like higher up position you're in, there’s still time to learn. There's still time to study new stuff like it's just endless. And I think I just went from a state of, you know, feeling this big imposter syndrome and actually just thinking, you know what? It's OK. I just need to focus on the basics first. Once I know the basics, then I can show people: Hey this content is from a beginner friendly perspective cause it's quite easy for us to assume that everyone is on the same level when it comes to using a specific tool or a specific product, but actually a lot of us are quite beginner, so I just focus my learnings on that and then once I'm past all the beginner friendly, then that's when I'll start doing the more intermediate or advanced concepts, but yeah, it's just all really about the learning perspective and trying to compare myself on how I was last week and then how I am this week in terms of the stuff that I've learn.
00:06:25 Lina Zubyte
Frequently we want some kind of expert to teach us things. Yet hearing your story, I think that it could be extremely valuable for us to hear from someone who was in the same place where we are right now, who just started. I wish there were more tutorials that were just OK, I didn't know anything about this a week ago, but let me get you to the point where I am now.
00:06:50 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I think the more we share to people that it's OK to not learn everything... So we were talking about this in one episode of a live stream that I also do with my good friend Nicole, is this sort of impression that we have in tech because tech in itself is already such an overwhelming industry. Like there's just so much things that we don't know. And I think these assumptions are actually hurting people who want to have a career in tech cause in their head they're like “Oh my gosh, I need to learn how to code or I need to know, you know these different concepts, these different programming languages.” But actually who we learn most of the stuff that we learn on the job. I didn't know about software testing in general until I actually worked in the field, so I think there's a lot of improvements we can do to make tech less overwhelming. And one of that is by showing people that look, I'm a senior, but I still don't know everything and that's OK.
00:08:01 Lina Zubyte
Yeah, there's so many tutorials to choose from, it's overwhelming. You don't know where to start. When you started learning about observability or I know another passion of yours is accessibility... how do you choose where to learn from and where to start?
00:08:18 Marie Cruz
I tend to choose topics that I know that I'm going to enjoy learning, because I think if you try to learn something and then it's not quite fun or it's not really aligned to what your interests are, then it's going to make the learning experience much more difficult. So, during the time when I was learning about accessibility, I got really into it because we were creating the first design system when I was in my previous employer. And there's just a lot of accessibility concepts that I needed to immerse myself in so that I can provide the highest value to my team because we need to make sure that all the components that we're going to deliver to different consumers, they're accessible because it's going to be the standard that teams will be using in terms of like what buttons to use and all the accessibility sort of improvements. So, it really has to align with what your interests are, because if you're not going to try and practise what you learn like you're just going to read it, and then you're like, OK, let me move on to the next topic, then the learning experience isn't gonna stick. It will probably feel like you're just ticking boxes. If you do it like that, but then actually it's more than ticking boxes. It's about applying what you've learned as well.
00:09:42
So first thing is, yeah, I always make sure that it's aligned to my current interest and it's aligned to the value that that can provide, whether that's the work or whether that's with personal, because, I got really into accessibility because few years back I had a wrist injury with my right wrist, so it was really making it hard to use my mouse. So I had to buy an ergonomic mouse and had to rely on my keyboard a lot, which was something that I didn't really even think about before because I'm like Oh yeah, I'll just use my mouse. I'll just use all the pointy stuff and I'm not gonna use my keyboard that much... But when I actually got that injury, I'm like, OK, how am I gonna be able to, you know, visit my favourite site or do my day today if I'm just gonna use my keyboard? So you start to be in someone else's shoes who's actually experiencing the disability. So the more I got into that, the more I was like, this is actually an interesting area to learn. And then I started talking about it to my colleagues, giving work presentations, and then like speaking at different online meetups as well, just to share to people that there's more to accessibility than making sure it's keyboard friendly. There's a lot of other areas as well that we need to focus on.
00:11:12
And I started reading books about it as well, and I got to a point where I've accumulated all these learnings, and this was when Angie Jones, when she was still in Applitools, and she was doing the whole test automation university platform and she contacted me to see if I'm interested to, you know, do a course. And I said, Ohh, what about accessibility? Because there's a lot of things that I think I can share based on what I've proposed as well to my work colleagues and yeah, so it's all down to accumulating all the knowledge that I've learned and then rather than gatekeeping those, I just share those with the community because there's a lot of, like free tools out there that can help make your software accessible.
00:12:07 Lina Zubyte
I guess sharing also is helping you learn better and digest whatever you've learned.
00:12:13 Marie Cruz
That's exactly true, because I think there's this saying that if you are able to explain to someone like whether that's to a kid or someone who doesn't have a lot of background knowledge, then yeah, you've really understood the subject and that's why I was so happy when I spoke at my daughter's school last week. Because I was getting a lot of interesting questions cause one of the kids actually asked me... Because I was explaining them what bugs are in a software testing and software development, and I was like, OK, but it's not the bugs that you might know, although I was using pictures of the ladybugs, the caterpillar. And then when I explained to them what bugs are by sharing them like a programme that doesn't work and then it's now working after I've done some fixes, they're like “ohh OK, so bugs are basically things that don't work” and then this one girl asked me: “So what do you do to make sure that the bugs don't appear?” And then I said “That's a really good question. So I write a test for it.” So it's such a great feeling to know that when you're trying to explain someone and these are kids like, they're really, really curious. So that's when you know that you actually know the subject area. It's when you've tried to teach it to someone who doesn't have prior knowledge about it and now they know more about it than like 5 minutes ago or something.
00:13:39 Lina Zubyte
Exactly. Sometimes this is what courses are lacking, right? They're explaining the concept, using abbreviations from the start or other complex terms, and you're confused, and you also may not like the instructor, which I think was a good tip that someone gave me that you have to like the instructor because you are going to spend quite some time with them. How do you choose your courses?
00:14:05 Marie Cruz
That's a good question, because I'm quite... It's like with audio books, I do choose different voices, I find ones that are quite appealing to me. So, if I first watch a video and it's like, OK, I think this person is explaining concepts really fast, then I'll try to find something else that like suits my learning styles a bit more cause I know all of us we have different learning styles. So it's just really trying to find what works best for you. What I wouldn't suggest is... Because I know some people, they have this habit of just buying a lot of courses from Pluralsight or Udemy and then they don't really, you know, finish the course, or it's just all like stacking up and it's like, OK well, you've wasted that money. So if you can find a free resource first. There's a lot of free tutorials out there, I think now we are so spoiled with choices. We've got a lot of courses up in YouTube that are free. These are from people as well who are keen in sharing their knowledge. And then I mentioned test automation university as a resource. And when I was learning about accessibility, so one tool that I really found useful was this 30 days of accessibility testing. So this was by Ministry of testing and this was from years and years back, but I still found it very valuable. And then when I found that learning experience, I try to just stick with it every day cause even though it sounds daunting, like, Oh my gosh, 30 days, I have to do this. But it's much better to do something a little like each day rather than trying to, I don't know, do something from like 9:00 AM until the evening. So it's much better just to divide it into chunks and it makes the learning much more manageable.
00:16:07 Lina Zubyte
I really liked the “30 days of...” series that Ministry of testing did. I did the 30 days of testing. I remember that was the first time when I used an extension for accessibility as well. That was one of the days. So for each day, they just had a task and then you try to Google it out, figure out what they mean with that and do a little exercise with that. I found it really helpful, especially that I was fairly fresh new QA then.
00:16:36 Marie Cruz
I think they're doing another 30 days. I think it's 30 days of AI testing this time around, so if you haven't checked it out, I really recommend, like everyone who's gonna listen to this, to just see how that is. If you're interested in AI testing.
00:16:51 Lina Zubyte
I really like your point about the free resources first. I feel like when we have access to these paid resources, we somehow think they're better in some kind of way. And we are like, I need to go to this very fancy conference and my company should pay €2000 because that's the best. That's the biggest! Not necessarily. Sometimes I talk to my colleagues and I'm like, OK, what do you want to learn? And for some QAs, I recommend test automation university. It's free. It's just there. I think the biggest price we are paying there is our time. It's not actually the monetary value. Even though you could say as well if you pay, you're more likely to do it. But very frequently it's companies that pay. So it doesn't hurt you that much. So you may still not do.
00:17:40 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I think it's well, it depends on how much you want to learn. So if you're just trying to learn like the surface level, then I guess I wouldn't recommend that you purchase a 20 hour tutorial or a 20 hour course or even longer. If you for example, just want to know how to write a basic test or how to install stuff because like I said, if you just use your Google skills, there's a lot of free resources out there. And I think what I found is that I also learned better when I try to do the practical stuff earlier on. So I'm just one of those people that I think if I consume too much tutorials and it's just explaining the theory for so long, but then the actual practical concept is not until the end, I feel like that's a good way of learning, maybe for some people, but for me, I like to do the hands on part immediately. So if I find a tutorial where ohh this person is showing me what I can achieve in let's say less than 5 minutes. Then I'll be much more curious to watch that whole video or read the entire content rather than, let's say, a one hour video, and then maybe down the line if I want to know more about that topic. And I'm like, OK, maybe, I can focus on much more longer videos, but if I'm just starting out I'd rather have something really quick straight to the point and that's something that I've tried to show in the video tutorials that I also share to people. So I mentioned a while ago that with my learnings that I'm trying to share in terms of observability, I share different videos to people on hey, this is how you can link alerts to your dashboard or this is how you can configure this type of visualisation panel, but I like to do it straight to the point rather than I guess, talk about all the different theories and stuff. So that's just my learning style and I know not everyone will have the same style and that's OK, but if I find, for example, that there's someone out there who has the same learning style as I do, then at least that video can help that person.
00:20:07 Lina Zubyte
Absolutely. I think learning styles is also a very interesting topic and how we all learn differently. But we also have very different people that we can learn from. So I feel like we all can find something that works for us. Nowadays in so many tech companies come to think of it we really talk about learning - that it's important. However, some people do not find the time for it. They're too busy developing some feature or stuck in their comfort zone. We even make them stuck in their comfort zone. Maybe. When we create certain roles and then we just say, oh, you do just this and you don't go somewhere. How do you think we could break this maybe? Why does it matter? And how to build the habit of still learning even though you have your tasks to do?
00:20:57 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I think with this, it's really important that we know our priorities and I guess this is where being disciplined and being consistent, those are much better attributes to have as compared to, hey, I want to learn, because I think if you build that habit of being disciplined and consistent, then learning will be easier for you in a sense that, OK you can schedule 30 minutes, or like an hour's time, because I know we're all busy individuals, you know, we've got a lot of personal stuff as well. Things that happen outside of work. And that's also important. You need to just prioritise, OK? In this moment, because we OK, let's say we all have the same 8 hours. So if your priority in those eight hours is to make sure that you get 30 minutes learning or maybe doing like a quick workout. Then add that to your schedule. Cause I think the more visible that you make it the easier for you to follow it along.
00:22:09
So one of the techniques that I've been doing is: I'm actually adding blocks of activities that I have to do, and I've added that to my calendar. So for example today I have a block for grafana learning because I have to move on to another visualisation type and then tomorrow as well I've added blocks, but then I'm leaving like small gaps as well, just so that there's time for me to relax because if I just block, let's say, the entire day for Grafana learning, then again that might look more daunting to some, whereas if you split it into smaller chunks, it's much better. I know we're going to talk about book recommendations, but something that has really helped me is Atomic Habits by James Clear, and I think with the habit of learning, we just have to make it easier for us to do so. If you're always, I guess, distracted with your phone as an example, what you can do is you can make it easier by prepping your environment. So putting your phone somewhere else or putting it in do not disturb mode. So at least you're not distracted by all the notifications.
00:23:34
Another technique is you can stack your habits. So, for example, you can do something like OK if I do this for 30 minutes then 5 minutes I can, you know, do this habit that I really enjoy doing. So try to make it fun. Try to reward yourself as well. It's really important that you're very disciplined. And I know there's a lot of distraction, especially most of us work from home. So there's going to be times when you would feel distracted, but I think this is when even trying to learn for let's say 10 minutes or 15 minutes a day. And we have 24 hours in a day, so it's just really finding that time to just use that opportunity to invest in yourself. Because if you, let's say, if you have an hour's time left your day, you can use that to maybe OK, I'll use 10 minutes to learn. And then as a reward, I can watch my favourite show and then you can then build that up slowly.
00:24:37 Lina Zubyte
I somewhere read about the 5 minutes rule: that if you have to do something, say OK, I'll do it for 5 minutes. And very frequently what happens is you're already in the mindspace that you do not quit doing this task. You will do it for half an hour even. Because 5 minutes is small enough for you to commit to, and then when you start doing it, you're OK. It's fine. The hardest part is to start.
00:25:04 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. Like even with other activities like writing, you just need to start. It doesn't have to be perfect, but as long as you have something written down, whether that's one sentence or one paragraph, that's much better cause at least today you've done something. What's not good is probably you've just look at it and you're like ohh, what am I gonna??? And you want to start but then in your head you're like, oh, but you have to make sure that you structure this first... Just write something. It doesn't have to be, you know, perfect. It doesn't have to be really well polished. Just need to really pour down whatever you're thinking. And the next day you can come back to it. And when you're in that headspace like you said, you feel like, OK, that 5 minutes was so fast. Let me, you know, do another five or do another 10 and then next thing you know, you've written one whole page.
00:25:59 Lina Zubyte
I think it's also very important for us to do what we like, to learn what we like, as you said, because if we are just learning for the sake of learning for the sake of checking the checkbox, that won't work in the long run.
00:26:16 Marie Cruz
Yeah, and that can lead to a burnout or other negative impact to your mental health. So it doesn't matter which topic you learn first, as long as you really, you know, enjoy it or it's really aligned to what your current interests are, not because ohh Lina's learning how to do this, let me learn that as well, yeah.
00:26:38 Lina Zubyte
And here maybe managers or our leaders or mentors could also support us and question our motivations because it's very easy to fall into this trap of thinking, OK, my career progression should be like this because most people do it that way. But maybe I'd suffer there. I would not enjoy it at all.
00:27:00 Marie Cruz
Yeah, I like that point that you've added around managers supporting us because one way that you can also support your manager, and this would make your performance review like much easier, is if you just make your work really visible for people out there to know that, hey, I've done this and we probably heard questions from let's say people from a software testing background like OK, how can I make my work more visible? Cause I guess if you're not in the test automation space or the coding space is much harder for you to make your work visible. But just sharing progress or sharing different resources that you found interesting or even doing some self promotion if for example you've written something, that's a way of making your work visible because then what it's benefiting you is like other people can also see the hard work that you've poured in. And then you get recognised more so I know it's a bit outside of like some people's comfort zone to promote their work because they think that it might be a form of bragging, but actually if you've done the work, it's not bragging cause it's really the truth. So you just need to share, maybe not to let's say at the beginning, not to everyone you can share to like few people, you know that you're comfortable with. And then when you're in that comfort level where you're OK to sharing it to the community or to the wider, you know, like people, then yeah, you can definitely continue with that.
00:28:35 Lina Zubyte
As you said as well before, sharing could help us learn better and that could be even super helpful to write it down in an understandable way to put our thoughts together. Talking about resources and courses, what are some of the book recommendations or courses or whatever it is that you would recommend for building this habit of learning?
00:29:02 Marie Cruz
Yeah. So I've already mentioned Atomic Habits by James Claire. I've read this book three times now, because it's just something that I always go back to. So James really tries to communicate to us that there are different ways that we can do to make a habit stick. And I use this as well. Not just with the habit of learning, but when I for example try to get back to exercising. I paused for a bit, but this was when I was really super in my fitness regime. I read atomic habits again because if you try to go back to an activity that you haven't done for such a long time, it's much harder because there's a lot of distractions, lots of pressure as well from not just you internally but from outside that can make that activity less appealing, especially if you've passed that activity for such a long time. So if you're looking to, you know, get a resource about really trying to make your habits stick, not just because you want to do it as a one week challenge or after New year most people will do the New Year resolution and then they will try to say, OK, I'm gonna do this. But if you really want some habits like to stick with you Atomic Habits by James Clear would be my number one resource.
00:30:29
There's another book quite similar to Atomic Habits called the Compound Effect. I've forgotten the name of the author, but it's called the compound effect, so it just shows that if you stick with something, whether that's a habit or, let's say, trying to invest or anything, you might not see the results immediately. But as years go by, then you'll definitely see the compound effects of it. So that's a really useful book to recommend and finally Mindset by Carol Dweck. That's really an awesome book because I think with some of the attitudes or behaviours that we really need to start showing is this growth mindset, rather than having a fixed mindset, cause at any point in our careers we would be in a stage where, yeah, we'll have to start over. Whether you're switching to a new job or switching to a different pathways like in tech.
00:31:39
One example I shared a while ago I switched from software testing to developer advocacy after being in the software testing space for 10 years. And so that was such a humbling move, because I get to learn a lot about what developer advocacy is really about, and if I have this fixed mindset, then I probably would have just stayed within the software testing space because I know that I'm good at it. I know that you know, this is my comfort zone, but actually there's so many areas in tech, where we can also provide impact too, so having a growth mindset really helps with that, because if you're just, I guess, stuck in what your comfort is or you're stuck in the same job that you've been doing for the past XYZ years, then how is that going to contribute to a continuous learning? And there might be situations where, yeah, it can still help you continuously learn, especially if you’re doing like different projects and not just doing the same thing again and again. So there's still a lot of value in that. But if you're just doing the same thing because you feel that that's where you're good at and that's where you're comfortable is, then that's not really contributing to this continuous learning aspect. So reading that book Mindset: it's one of my top three.
00:33:04 Lina Zubyte
As well. Nice. Thank you so much. We'll add these books to the episode notes and now to come full circle and to wrap up this conversation, what is the one piece of advice you would give for building high quality products and teams?
00:33:21 Marie Cruz
I think for this, my biggest advice would be always think outside the box. I know that when we are given requirements, there's a tendency for us to just follow whatever is written to basically like, yeah, complete a check box. But there's a lot of different and creative ways to make sure that what we are covering as part of that feature, it can also be tested in a way that's not in the requirements. For example, like with the accessibility stuff cause in order for us to really incorporate accessibility, we might have to think outside the box get, you know, like curious, get people in not just from one group, but also from a wider group. And this is where having that diverse perspective really helps, because if we can incorporate diverse feedback ,diverse voices, then that can ensure that we are trying to help our teams deliver a high quality product. So just to reiterate, think outside the box, incorporate people that you probably haven't considered at the beginning, and even if you're already in the middle or you're almost at the end of the project, there's still a lot of benefit in trying to get feedback from not just one voice, but a multitude of voices as well, cause at least you can give that feedback back to your team. And then as long as your team can welcome that feedback and then improve the next round or the next feature, then I think that's a win immediately.
00:35:06 Lina Zubyte
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Marie.
00:35:08 Marie Cruz
Thank you, Lina.
00:35:10 Lina Zubyte
That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. Check out the episode notes. Share this episode with your friends and let me know what you thought of it. And until the next time, do not forget to continue caring about and building those high quality products and teams. Bye.