The 1-hour difference
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I'm not sure why people celebrate when someone drops a new 10-hour course. It's absurd to me. A real slap in the face to all the busy students out there. You know the ones celebrating are the "productive procrastinators" who are excited for their next Netflix binge. I love Netflix as much as anyone, okay? In fact, my wife & I pride ourselves on juggling multiple streaming subscriptions so we always have something to watch. (watched 4 more episodes of Abbott Elementary last night btw) But that's not what a course is. It's not there to entertain you. It's supposed to teach you valuable skills so you can earn back the time you spent watching it as quickly as possible. It's supposed to save time, not waste it. I've been thinking about this idea of the "1-Day Bootcamp". Because that's essentially what I'm creating with the Modern QA course. If you're keen, you can binge that course by doing the work quickly within 1 day. You might need more than a day, but it's not impossible to learn it all if you had me at your beck and call for 12 hours with no distractions. It's a solution to the dilemma of the 10-hour course that seems great on the surface but actually is a colossal waste of time. These 10-hour courses are a sign the person doesn't understand their subject well enough to condense it down further. Anything can be explained in under an hour if you know it well. Especially if you force the person to do something with that knowledge during that hour. People don't learn by watching your stupid slide deck. They learn by having something to do with that knowledge. That's why you can go to a conference and nothing about your life will improve until you put the speakers' advice into action. For example, I've always wondered what Cypress is like. But I never did anything about it. I knew what it was, I'd heard people talk about it. But I'm still over here with no Cypress project, not even 1 test written. So recently, I did this:
In 30 minutes, I figured out the secret to learning: investment. By getting to know the speaker beforehand, I had unknowingly invested time in Cypress. By attending the talk, I was putting myself in a position to actually learn Cypress. By opening my VS Code editor during the talk, I was making it easy to act on that learning. 90% of the people on that call just popped popcorn and chips while she talked. I actually learned something that day. And what if everyone was forced to code during the talk? Everyone else in that call would have a Cypress project to boast on their GitHub portfolio, too. Would it be the most amazing Cypress project? Hell no. But it'd be a start. And the start is the part everyone hates. The Modern QA course is my answer to the 10-hour courses out there. I'm proving you can shatter your own limiting beliefs about not just 1, but multiple valuable skill sets in 1 day's time. If you're willing to invest. Investment is how you get started. Confidence is how you continue. I make the first one a requirement, and the second one a result. So in case you're wondering why Steven's all excited about a course when there's a million of them out there. In case you're wondering "what's the big deal about a course anyway?" It's because I'm going to disrupt everyone's way-too-long course and prove they didn't need to spend 10 hours in front of a camera to help people learn. And I'm going to start a movement with this. Just the other night I hopped on another 1-hour ADPList mentoring call. I helped someone I just met fix their Playwright test suite in under 15 minutes. It was a "micro-skill" that allowed me to do this: configuring a Playwright config file correctly. If that can take 15 minutes to fix, it takes even less time to teach from scratch. Imagine the possibilities. The new era of online technical education is coming. Happy Wednesday, Steven |
Steven Boutcher
Helping software testers increase their authority and influence.
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