From educator to evangelist: how poetry got me into tech

PJ Metz: So excited to be a part of DevRelCon 2021. And yeah, this is from educator to Evangelist, how poetry got me into Tech, and this is a very professional, very serious presentation, or it's just sometimes I still feel like I'm in school and I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. So let's talk about me. Well, first, let me give you this poem. So like I said, from Poetry to Tech. This is a poem by Emily Dickinson, which a lot of you probably have heard of and have experienced in high school, and you probably read something about death. This poem is actually about telling the truth and how you have to tell it, not directly, because sometimes lightning and bright lights can be too much, and so you have to tell it a little bit differently. And I love this poem basically for the two words right here.

Dazzle Gradually are the two prettiest words I've ever heard next to each other. I love this poem. I'm not going to teach you this poem. I'd love to, but there'll be a link at the end of someone who will talk to you about this poem. I would just wanted to show you something that I'm passionate about and that I love. So, hello class. My name's PJ Metz. I'm an education evangelist at GitLab.

I'm a community talk coder. I had mentors, I learned from people on Twitter, and I used code academy. com to learn how to code. About one year and six months ago in May of 2020, I spent 11 years as a high school teacher. I taught high school English. That was standard level English honours level English ap, and that was ninth through 12th grade. So 14 to 18 year olds. All throughout my career, I taught ESOL in Korea, four to 17 year olds.

I did some private tutoring and some afterschool lessons as well. I taught summer school PE for a few summers. I was a math tutor even though I was an English teacher. And I've done a lot of different types of teaching, and that's my background and that's what I did for 11 years. And I thought that's all I was going to do. So I want to talk to you a little bit about what a teacher does and why what a teacher does is important. So a teacher does everything. We do everything.

So we're part educator obviously, but we're part psychologists. The kids having a bad day, we have to recognise those signs. We have to help kids through those bad days. We have to help kids understand their own actions sometimes. Sometimes we're a social worker, sometimes we're a cop telling people don't run in the hallway.

Where's your pass? Are you supposed to be here right now? We're part fire marshal.

When we help run fire drills, we're part nurse. When covid hit, I literally took people's temperature and had to check for symptoms of covid. We're a part academic, like researching and being a part of our field. We're a part party planner. When I used to teach the Great Gatsby at the end of the Great Gatsby, we would do a big party just like Gatsby threw, except no one died at the end. Spoiler Gatsby dies. At the end of the Great Gatsby, I was part coach. I literally coached girls tennis and I was also a drumline instructor.

At my most recent job we're part manager, motivational speaker, detective, protector, advocate IT support. I can't tell you how many kids iPads I had to help fix when we had iPads live in the classroom, and I had to know how to do all of this as a teacher.

So there's another presentation here at Deron that talked about the many hats of DevRel. Can I tell you, I had a hat collection as a teacher of all the things that I had to do back then. So doing so much, like I said, it was all in preparation for what I do now as an education evangelist. Now, for those of you saying, what's an education evangelist? How is that a part of DevRel? Well, I'm part of a team at GitLab that tries to get free licences to students so that they can use GitLab in the classroom.

And really we try and give it to professors and professors, get the students involved, and it's a whole complicated thing. That is a great thing and I want to tell you more about it, but that's not what's important. Today. I am talking to students, I'm talking to professors, I'm talking to deans and chairs.

I am talking to professional groups of students. I'm talking to engineering fraternities. I'm talking to a lot of different people, and I have to know how to connect and be a part of all of that. And it's not a traditional DevRel job because I'm not with developers, but you know who I am with a bunch of people who want to be developers, and they are developers.

They're out there, they're building open source products, they're doing stuff, they're learning, but they are developers. It's just in a different realm kind of. So my job of switching between giving workshops to people who are not familiar with Git, let alone GitLab, and doing internal conversations with people that I work with and coworkers and staff level developer evangelists that we have on our team, between clients and partners, between performance and casual, I have to switch all the time what I'm doing.

So having been a teacher and doing all this really helped prepare me for this. So a lot of what made me want to be a teacher is that I am passionate about literature. I love literature. I love poetry. I love novels.

I love short stories. I love plays. I love all of it. It's exciting for me to read these pieces and to analyse them. I read for fun. One of my favourite books I ever read was Beloved by Tony Morrison, a beautifully written, amazing novel that also will suddenly switch the time periods in the middle of a sentence, a character will smell something and it'll trigger a memory for that character. And we go from the late 18 hundreds to the mid 18 hundreds in the middle of a sentence. And I loved it.

I would read that with a pencil and take notes in the margins, not because I was writing a paper, not because I was writing a book about Tony Morrison, because I loved that process of looking at how the book was built and looking at how Tony Morrison and other authors create these worlds and what they use to make it.

So analysis, discussions of themes, motifs, subtext, authors choice. That was my favourite part of teaching. I brought something I was passionate about to the students. It was fantastic. And these students, the concept of a hidden meaning of subtext, they have no idea that it even exists. Oftentimes, analysis is a very difficult thing for them to understand because they're used to who are the characters, what's the plot, what happened and where did it take place? Because that's how we learn to read what's the story.

Subtext is very difficult for them to learn because they've already learned how stories work. And I'm like, oh, but it's also different than that. So it's a little confusing. So students often see it as an answer to find as opposed to a process or an argument to make. Nothing was more disheartening than being a teacher and asking for an opinion.

And no one wants to say anything. They just look at you because they're afraid they're going to say the wrong answer when I'm just asking for conversation. So that's my passion and that's what I really liked about being a teacher.

And the central problem of me as a teacher was how do I take students who know stories as this existence, plot setting characters and help them understand more complex ideas like subtext and metaphor? It goes against everything they've learned up to that point. And that's what I focused on all the time. Taking students from, I don't get it to. I know it well enough to explain it, and lemme tell you it's hard to do. It takes a lot of honesty about your passion being real and being authentic. Just like the previous presenter said, it's all about authenticity, right? It takes creating community.

These students don't care.

What if they don't know you care. It takes an understanding of learning styles. It's having them practise real work. It's assigning students to teach sections, so they have to learn about it and explain it to their peers as well. It's finding what they like and incorporating it into class. And y'all basically what DevRel is in my experience, you have to be passionate now. You should be excited about whatever product, whatever company it is that you're sharing with the world, right?

You're excited about it and you want to share that excitement with others. You need to build relationships. You cannot go in there as a marketer because developers don't want that. They want to be authentic. They want to know how does your product help? They want to take workshops and they want to find ways better to explain concepts and products. And you need to sometimes train the trainer because if you make an evangelist out of someone, they're definitely going to be there helping convert other people to using your product as well.

And you got to create those super fans, right?

So as we transition to this next section, another poem and a poet that many people probably already know about is Robert Frost. And this poem talks about the beginning of something as being the most beautiful time nature's first. Green is gold the first time that nature comes out of winter and starts making leaves and flowers again is beautiful, but it's only there for a little bit. So it's about that transition time and learning something new, the excitement of being somewhere new and how it doesn't last forever, and it's important to hold onto that. So let's talk about how I changed careers and who helped me. These are my mentors. This is Brandon Minnick. He can find him at the Code Traveller on Twitter.

And this is Chloe Condon. You can find her at Chloe Condon on Twitter.

These are two of the most important people in my career because both of them taught me something really important about my new career and helped me switch after 11 years of teaching into something that I just started in May of 2021. I've only been in education evangelism. I've only been working in tech for six months. So Brandon is literally the person who said, I think you can learn the code. And he met with me twice a week over summer 2020 to help me learn anywhere between one to four hours a session. He pointed me to resources.

He convinced me to start a twitch and he would stream with me on Twitch about anything. He brought me into his circle of context and of contacts and help support me, and we're still working together. We have a podcast at Eight Bits tv. We stream about twice a month making something, usually a website or an app.

And he helped turn my passion into a project with y nfp. net, your new favourite poem, which is a website that he helped me build about poetry. And he represents the value of sharing knowledge. This is all stuff that I would've been lost trying to find on my own as a new coder.

As a new developer, your knowledge can fill in a gap for somebody else. Chloe told me that we need more creatives in tech. She knew about my teaching background, about my poetry and music background, and she said, we need people like you because there's a lot of places where creative people can really flourish in tech. She was willing to meet with me to talk about code, about the industry, to give me advice, to help me with her five years of knowledge in the tech industry and help me succeed. She also streamed with me, invited me onto that show, eight bits I talked about earlier that used to be Chloe and Brandon.

That's me. And Brandon now made a show with me about getting a job in tech. She helped make Twitter bots with me.

She helped me make the Shania Twain bot, the Ariana Grande bot, the Mariah Carey bot, the NSYNC bot. We made a bunch of Twitter bots together and it helped build my skills and helped me understand coding and documentation and all of that. She sent me resources and she represents the value of seeing somebody like yourself in tech. Your background and your experience is an asset, not a liability. Chloe came from theatre. She was a working actress before she got into tech, and her background helped make her a better DevRel. My background as a teacher, as a musician, as a poet, is going to help make me a better DevRel, and it's just about spending time to figure out how that's going to be.

Mentors that believe in and spend time with mentees, especially from nontraditional backgrounds, are much needed.

How can we get better people into this field? We have to be willing to help others find opportunities here, and especially finding people who have those nontraditional backgrounds, right? That wider net brings more information and it helps people understand better. So what can you do? Well, we tend to make content and connections with the higher level people. What are you doing for people who are just starting? What are you doing for people who are brand new to your product? There's lots of beginner guides that aren't really beginner friendly.

Can you make it better? Be a mentor if you can. Honestly, it's mostly a great opportunity to learn more yourself because you can learn something new with your mentee. And finally, embrace your background and your own unique journey that brought you to this place.

Talk about it. Let people know where you came from. This is the last poem. It's by Mary Oliver.

And what's really lovely about this poem is the last four lines. A lot of the poem is about being in a field. She says, tell me what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die lasting too soon? And then she says, tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I love this poem. It's really good. I suggest reading it all, and I suggest learning about it at this link at the bottom here.

These are some links. I shared my SlideShare in Discord, so you can click on it and read through all of this. There's a bunch of stuff on this link. You can find my podcast, my Twitter, my Twitch. Reach out to me, y'all find me. Tweet me. Your favourite English class assignment. What did you read that you absolutely adored?

And that's a gif of me at a football game back in 2012. And I'm hilarious. And this has been PJ Metz. Thank you so much. This slide came from Slides mania, and the images are from Unsplash. Y'all have been great. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here. And thank you for the time to be a part of DevRel Con 2021.

Reach out to me, tweet at me at metson around.