@grimalkina@mastodon.social
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grimalkina

@grimalkina@mastodon.social

Social & Evidence Scientist. Defender of the mismeasured. 🦄🏳️‍🌈 she/they

Studying how developers thrive. My focus areas include how people form beliefs about learning and build strategies for resilience, productivity & motivation. Quant Psych PhD (but with a love for qual) and VP of Getting Tech to Do Real Open Science.

Founder of the Developer Success Lab ❤️
Neighborhood Cool Science Aunt

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grimalkina, to random
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God it's weird to fight like, DECADES long battles to exist online and persist despite all the waves of terrifying homophobic harassment etc and like, use your tiny little baby hardly there platform(s) because it helps you to do completely unvalued free labor stuff like reach students and do volunteer work, and then gradually try to expand into other online spaces you didn't even know about and be told you're The Problem With Social Media

This is about fediverse conversations about twitter

grimalkina, to random
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This paradox remains wild to me. I think about my experiences working with teachers who make so little money and suffer so much and yet frequently support each other's learning and directly see the value of their own learning so much. And with developers we have some of the best resourced knowledge workers in the world, fully bought in to the idea of lifelong learning, and absolutely hiding it in the middle of their workplaces that rest on that learning

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112576399100763600

grimalkina,
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I mean I get it (we all struggle to do sustainable humane work in this era) but sometimes I do NOT get it (if EVEN IN THIS situation people struggle so...oh how powerful culture is)

grimalkina, to random
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This incredible story of this incredible student 😭

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/transfer-students-triumph-class-2024#manuel

I am so so so proud of @analog_ashley for funding, creating and leading the STARTneuro program. Incredible to see this amazing program have its first graduates.

"“STARTneuro is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says Vasconcelos. “I love what I am doing, and I wouldn’t be where I am now if not for this program.”"

grimalkina,
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I've watched the years of effort, and constant, present, every-single-day mentoring that @analog_ashley does to run not a bandaid or a STEM program that lives in the abstract, but a deeply structural, long-term program that lives and breathes STEM education access within the people who live HERE, the students that need help HERE, the community building students need HERE. It is not done in a day it's done in years. And on top of that done with less funding than work like this deserves.

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@analog_ashley is too humble & hard-working to talk much about all that she has done with this program & as a neuroscience educator. But anyone who has been involved with a program like this knows how hard it is & what it means to get funding for it, make it work & make impact on this kind of problem in one of the most elite & selective STEM pathways, where nearly all transfer students are cut off from consideration at even the initial entrypoints like working in undergrad lab positions.

grimalkina,
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But guess what -- you can donate to this program if you wish!!

You can learn more about the program overall here: https://ugresearch.ucsd.edu/programs/all-urh-programs/start-neuro/index.html

They have a fund through UCSD: https://giveto.ucsd.edu/giving/home/gift-referral/8dfa8984-7da2-4d59-b762-92621fa6228e

I'm not involved in any way (except for sometimes hosting the scholars at a bbq at our house haha...and a lot of support to the program director), I just think this program is absolutely beautiful and more people should know about it. The future of science is for everyone.

@analog_ashley

grimalkina,
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@danilo I've been telling @analog_ashley to please pitch a talk about the insights of this program to a tech conference and she never believes me that people could find it so uplifting and interesting!!!

grimalkina, to random
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Ok enough me complaining about research that I want to read not existing (https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112576085634643142), let's do something actionable.

So you're in an engineering org using something like Copilot. You want tips from science so YOU feel you are using them in a way that is efficient & grows your skills vs muting them. Or you want to help colleagues.

(Even if you profoundly disagree w/these tools, there is benefit in a harm reduction approach & knowing what helps the humans right here right now)

grimalkina,
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Overall compare and contrast is incredibly good for our learning skills but we tend to avoid it! We often think "well if I want to get good at a thing I should use it all the time or ONLY focus on it." Not true. Compare and contrast unlocks many superpowers in learning and is really efficient. Give yourself permission to HALF use a tool like copilot and half not.

grimalkina,
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Learners with great self-regulation practice reflection. This is another thing we avoid, but where a tiny investment pays off wildly.

Taking fifteen minutes for reflection can wildly strengthen your metacognitive skills. This is how you figure out what your own "deliberate practice" could be. This can be simple. List a small number of things copilot was great at and a small number it wasn't. Explain it to someone else. You'll start to force yourself to be aware of your own mental models

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

Let's move away from individual cognition and into the social (SPOILER, they interact!!!). Our research has found that a LARGE % of developers don't KNOW what tools their colleagues use and report mixed usage. This creates ambiguity, confusion, and my guess is often a lot of fear esp for junior folks wondering if they "look like a good developer in this org."

Simply raising the question: "what are our biggest fears about genAI?" can be POWERFUL

grimalkina,
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Doing this as a group conversation is a hallmark of a learning and belonging culture (https://www.pluralsight.com/resource-center/guides/new-developer-research-paper). Our research also found that you shouldn't assume "everyone is doing it", team vs individual usage is mixed. Who is "left out" of adoption is an important conversation here. Shared team norms is probably a really good place to start -- answering the q "what do I expect from you as my colleague with these tools" is a meaningful conversation

grimalkina,
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Maybe you're not on a team where a big team culture retrospective feels possible. It still might be really useful and important to check your assumptions about how "everyone else" is doing it (or if you have that visibility -- don't assume your junior colleagues KNOW how "everyone else" is doing it). Be generous about sharing mistakes, or failures you see with it; modeling this sparks other people to do the same.

grimalkina,
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Elevate the human skills involved in all software work -- this recognition strengthens belonging culture. Being explicit about EFFORT is something many of us don't do enough, particularly if you're in a very "output" driven workplace, making that effort visible might be important advocacy.

Also is a counterbalance: is a tradeoff not being voiced? "this changed how I did x but I saw to make x work we needed y" (like more code...more pressure on colleagues to code review type stuff)

grimalkina,
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Honestly -- most software developers are strongly committed to being lifelong learners, but we are STRUGGLING to have learning CULTURES on teams. Tying learning time, effort, and goals to technological innovation is really key I feel. The moment of generative coding tools could be a moment to make this very clear inside of an org. We see learning culture-high devs report higher team effectiveness and productivity. Learning culture isn't a magical thing it comes from deliberate choices

grimalkina,
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@jcachada I was just talking to my wife this morning and how she has used Loom to do "let's look at this together" with student projects :)

That is a lovely usecase and generous example!

grimalkina, (edited )
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@level2wizard I'm not sure if I'm totally following what you're saying. But if we start from the premise that what people are doing is constantly doing something you want them to learn to change, then this comparison is probably key to motivating a change.

grimalkina,
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@sue 🥹❤️

grimalkina,
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@level2wizard I share your concerns!! Particularly because this is reinforced by emerging disparities in who is using these processes and tools and for what purpose, and I'm sure woefully inaccurate perceptions around that usage are the norm from much of leadership.

What do you think can help people inside this situation?

grimalkina,
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@level2wizard do you think that there might be some situations where people can influence the decisions of their teams? The feedback their junior colleagues get? The professional discourse and investments of what engineers spend their budgets on? Because I've seen those teams have a lot of power

grimalkina, to random
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So many "developers produce more quantities of code with copilot" studies so few "the patterns of interleaving and retrieval change depending on active vs passive consumption of generated solutions and we have like fifty years of research on this in learning science and so maybe we can apply it to make good recommendations about the best usage of generated work output" studies

grimalkina,
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@glyph every single research paper I've submitted to a software journal or conference, the reviewers have pushed back on participant demographics -- collecting them at all, or reporting them. It is neither standard nor behind-the-scenes understood imho. I imagine this might vary quite a lot depending on if you have a pool of reviewers you always get sent to or whatever vs kind of random which is the unlucky position I've been in.

grimalkina,
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@glyph yep this is baffling compared to social science journals

grimalkina,
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@robparsons @glyph I really appreciate this, a succinct statement of truth. We are in such debt to the people who have fought for progress on this

grimalkina,
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@sue breaks my heart a wee bit because I had a similar idea when I was a co-founder of a dev tools startup hahaha I really wanted us to experiment with making some reflection/celebration moments inside the editor (our tool was helping people do documentation closer to the moment of writing code so we experimented with some in-editor things) including ones you could share with a small circle of peers. Would've loved to study that

grimalkina,
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@sue those of us who care about people learning are probably always bumping into the same learning-shaped needs out there 😭😭😭

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