As a tech lead or senior developer, you’re expected to mentor and train more junior teammembers - coaching is already part of your job. In this masterclass with Emily Bache, you’ll learn skills and concrete activities you can use to bring on others and build up your team. You don’t need to be a full-time technical coach to make a difference in your organization. This course will help you to get started with learning hours and ensemble working. These are not vacuous “icebreaker”-style fun and games, the focus is on real hard technical skills, especially around TDD, refactoring, handling legacy code and better OO design. Real technical coaching is about leading team activities that strengthen your collaboration and ability to discuss code and make better design decisions.

Course topics

• Technical coaching, what it is and how you could benefit from it without going full-time
• How to lead “learning hour” training / team building sessions
• More engaging and useful sessions with Training from the Back of the Room
• Using learning goals to make training more relevant
• Creating a safe, engaging coding environment with your team
• Ensemble roles, rotations and structure
• Practical tips to improve communication and collaboration
• Adapting materials and activities for the needs of your team

Much of the time will be spent in hands-on exercises, writing and discussing code. You will come away with the knowledge and materials you need to get started with coaching activities with your team.

Bring a laptop. The focus is on the skills and collaboration and session structure so the exact details of the exercises and programming languages should not be the focus. We will have exercises in straightforward Java or C# and will provide a suitable online environment so you only need to use a modern browser to take part.

This session is designed for team leads and senior developers who take an active part in developing software, who also have an interest in mentoring and coaching the people around them. No previous experience of coaching is needed, but if you are already a technical coach you should find plenty of new ideas and inspiration in this training.