Back to School

There is a bunch of us at Macadamian that are volunteering as mentors for a small group of High-School students that are interested in software product development. The kids picked a small project to work on and we're helping them to turn it into a product.


Of course, the main interest of the kids is technology and actual coding but, as part of the mentoring, we're also helping them with some of the things that surround development. For example, we set them up on GitHub and thought them the basics of source control.


Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting them for the first time and, as one of those non-coding activities, we ran a bit of a design workshop where we spent time on the whiteboard wireframing the UI for a particular user story for their application. 


It was really cool to break down the specific story into the various bits and to sketch a UI with them. We got them to get their first ideas on the board and then, challenged their design using the personas that they had defined in previous weeks. By asking questions like "Would Tony really know what to pick here?" they were able to break down their assumptions (which were based on the physical model of the data) and redesign a UI which was more respectful of the user's mental model and their context of use.


At one point during the session, one of the kids turned to me and asked: "Do you really do this on projects?". I must have had this stupid grin on my face when I answered yes. The voice in the back of my head was saying: "Can you believe that I get paid to do this?".


By the end of the session, we had a complete workflow documented that they will be able to go out and code this week. And the kids had a glimpse of one of the non-coding parts of what turns a piece of software into a product.


I'm really excited to see how it turns out.