Building a Better Scala Community

Building a Better
Scala Community
Kelley Robinson
@kelleyrobinson
© 2019 TWILIO INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

@kelleyrobinson
COMMUNITY = ALL OF US

@kelleyrobinson
COMMUNITY = WORKPLACE

@kelleyrobinson
COMMUNITY = CONFERENCES

@kelleyrobinson
COMMUNITY = ONLINE

How do we build a better
community?
@kelleyrobinson

1. PRACTICE EMPATHY
2. BUILD TRUST
3. EMPOWER OTHERS
@kelleyrobinson

PRACTICE EMPATHY

@kelleyrobinson
Q: If you had a machine that could
dispense an infinite amount of
anything what would it be?
A: Empathy
Mike Schur
Showrunner (Parks and Rec, The Good Place)
Reddit AMA, January 2018

Why are you building
what you're building?
@kelleyrobinson

Why are things built
the way they are?
@kelleyrobinson

@kelleyrobinson
"lol why are you using scalatra, it's a
garbage web framework"
- me, once 😬
❌

Just because you
can doesn't mean
you should

What does the customer need?
@kelleyrobinson

Industry != Academia
@kelleyrobinson

Where are people
coming from?
•Language background
•Company size
•Industry type

BUILD TRUST

You don't have to know everything
@kelleyrobinson

Who do you
trust more?
@kelleyrobinson
1. Asks no questions
2. Asks thoughtful
questions

Thoughtful questions
make you look smarter
@kelleyrobinson

@kelleyrobinson
I am trying to ____, so that I can ____.
I'm running into ____.
I've looked at ____ and tried ____.
KWu | Senior Software Engineer, Heroku
blog.newrelic.com/culture/better-junior-developer

@kelleyrobinson
I am trying to edit our auto-generated
documentation, so that I can fix a broken
code sample. I'm running into failing tests.
I've looked at the equivalent SMS docs and
tried editing X+Y files.

Reciprocity
builds trust
Experienced engineers should
model this behavior

Avoid feigning
surprise
"You haven't heard of
Apache Spark?!?"
"Cool I get to tell you about
a data processing tool!"
❌
✅

Vulnerability
builds trust
Everyone loves a good story
about failure

Admit when you don't know
something & help normalize a
growth mindset.
@kelleyrobinson

@kelleyrobinson

Looking for talk inspiration? Tell a
story about what went wrong and
what you learned from it.
@kelleyrobinson

@kelleyrobinson
Don't assume
"basic" knowledge
is universal
My best performing Twilio blog post

EMPOWER OTHERS

@kelleyrobinson
Follow the Pac-Man Rule

@kelleyrobinson
Leave physical space for
a new person to join a conversation

@kelleyrobinson
Expand and repeat!

Inside the
workplace
• Hire and train folks
without Scala experience
• Reward engineers for
non-code behaviors

Outside the
workplace
• Teach at ScalaBridge
• Answer Stack Overflow
questions
• Coach someone on their
meetup presentation

@kelleyrobinson
ScalaBridge.org
@scalabridge
Slack! (DM for invite link)

@kelleyrobinson
ScalaBridge.org
Yifan X. Heather M.Noel W.
👏👏👏

@kelleyrobinson
dev.to codenewbie.org

PRACTICE EMPATHY
BUILD TRUST
EMPOWER OTHERS

The community is yours.
@kelleyrobinson

Be kind to each other.
We're all trying our best.
@kelleyrobinson

Building a Better Scala Community

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