I worked as a database and application developer at companies around the Seattle area for many years. As an application developer I created a projects scheduler for Boeing Customer Service back when the personal computer was making its way into the business market. When the power of the internet made its way into our offices and livingrooms during the 1990's, I took jobs that would enable me to to learn to program on the internet. When a large hospital in the Seattle area got access to a feature in the health care system that allowed them to open a web page when a patient chart was accessed, I got a job there helping to develop a dashboard that could give a quick visual synopsis of the patient's medical status.
Sometimes I started working for a company to solve a big problem, and sometimes it was just to learn about the technology they were using. Since college, I have enjoyed learning. Programming has made it possible to test and optimize big systems, where I am often learning by experimentation. A few years ago, as I saw that Developer Education was an expanding field, I made a move away from Software Engineering and into Teaching. Developer Education can be carried out at Universities, Bootcamps, and Corporations. I've taught in all of these venues.
I like creating curriculum. To that end, I started a Masters of Science degree at Quinnipiac University. The program I'm in emphasizes multi-media learning. I have been using what I learned in my job at Cloudinary. I think there is a lot more I can do in the eLearning space, and I am most motivated to apply it to teaching developers how to use complex systems.
I started working for Cloudinary as a Developer Instructional Designer. In 2022, I was promoted to Curriculum Program Manager for Developer Education. I create self service courses that are available on the Cloudinary Academy website. When I create a course, I work closely with Subject Matter Experts, who are developers, solutions architects, support engineers, advanced product manager from around the company to discover learning objectives and verify the material that I am going to share with the public. As our team (the Director and I) established a roadmap of courses from beginner to advanced, we started repurposing content in different formats. I now spend time working on monthly webinars. I recruit subject matter experts from around the company to deliver content that I create in the form of Goolge slides and code. I also deliver content monthly. I'm maintaining the cloudinary-training GitHub organization of code repositories that supports all of our courses, including the webinars.
I worked as a full time instructor for a Web Developer Certification program. This program was designed for adults who were working full time and wanted to move into working in technology. The curriculum focused on Front-end development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Vue.js framework. The students also learned to work with data using APIs. Students also learned about SEO by configuring Google Analytics and adding it to their websites.
The bootcamp experience is challenging for students and instructors. Students generally are not working, and instead engaged in a daily learning and coding experience. For the most part, students were taking 3 10 week courses that took them from introductory HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Fullstack Development with Node.js or Python. I worked closely with students helping them troubleshoot their work. Every Friday, I got the students going to the whiteboards in pairs to practice the interview experience where they would ask each other to code solutons to problems.
Here I will summarize the companies and technologies that I have worked with as a programmer. The list begins with my first programmming job out of college.
Quinnipiac's Instructial design program covers learning theory, the use of tools like Canva and Captivate, as well as web design. The approach emphasizes the value of multimedia content based on the summary of research leading to Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia learning. It is a project based program. All of the courses involved designing some facet of content. We also built projects as teams in some courses.
In addition to core courses in accounting, marketing and management, I specialized in Finance and Quantitative Methods. For example, I took additional courses in investment and statistics. I also took many courses in the department of computer science. Many of the computer science courses I took in graduate school, such as Data Structures and Algorithms turned out to be very useful as I pursued a career in computer programming. While I was in Grad School, I worked as a research assisant developing database software to help grad students find scholarships. I also spent two summers interning at IBM and Weyerhauser.
College was a like a candy story of learning. I worked on pre-med requirements and completed coursework in checmistry, biology, physics and math. At the same time, I was interested in Psychology and language. I read ancient Greek for a year. I decided not to pursue medicine after working in hospitals. I paid my way through college and needed to graduate and work. After graduating, I got a job as a computer operator and took some programming classes. That led to my return to graduate school.
Instructional design at this point in time is more of an art than a science. It is evolving and I want to contribute to this.
As a software developer, I was engaged in the agile development involving lots of feedback and iteration. I would like to see this with curriculum development.
Just like code review, content review is necessary with curriculum development, and sometimes more difficult to provide. To make this work, content has to be modular.
I have been involved in data analysis since the start of my career. There are so many tools now and expectations that learning can be measured and tied to program development, or even the bottom line.
I am interested in developing curriculum that involves coding. I also realize the challenges of presenting code and am alway lookingn for new tools and ways to innovate with this.
Communication and Community are important in software development. It can take time to develop a new community, but there are ways to join existing communities.
Read blog posts I have written on dev.to and medium.
I was learning R for a class. When I started with Rank and Order, I found it a little confusing and wanted to figure out a way to explain it. I also wanted to learn from feedback.
While working at Cloudinary, I created course content with the help of Subject Matter Experts. I would often try to blog about it before we presented the course live. It helps to create full narratives even if you don't plan on reading them to an audience.
This slide deck is an example of what I prepare for monthly webinars. As a developer, I am both text oriented and I like to draw boxes with arrows. As an instructional designer, I am trying to emphasize the visual elements in a slide deck.