Exploring the Slow Growth Approach to Empowering Technology Users

Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts and curious minds! Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on a concept that’s been brewing in my mind for quite some time now - the idea of a slow growth community effort to empower people in the realm of technology. This isn’t just about coding (though that’s certainly a big part of it), but about fostering a deeper understanding and command of the digital tools that shape our world.

So, what exactly is “can.code”? Well, it’s many things related to software development, but at its core, it’s about empowerment. We’re interested in building a community that can help any person gain the confidence and skills to truly command technology, rather than feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by it.

Now, you might be wondering, “Why slow growth? Isn’t the tech world all about moving fast and breaking things?” And you’d be right to ask. But here’s the thing: in order to go fast, sometimes we need to go slow. Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But let me explain.

The Foundation of Slow Growth

The slow growth approach isn’t about crawling along at a snail’s pace. Rather, it’s about taking the time to do our work with intention and care. This includes paying attention to details that inform us when we need to be agile, when we need to make trade-offs, and when we need to apply a quick fix instead of striving for perfection.

By building a solid foundation through this slow, intentional approach, we’re actually equipping ourselves to move faster and more efficiently in the long run. It’s about creating a stable base from which we can navigate the often tumultuous currents of the software industry without burning out or losing sight of our goals.

Empowering Anyone to Code

Now, I know it might sound a bit cliché, but I truly believe that anyone can code if it’s what they want to do. My own experiences with imposter syndrome, coupled with the shared experiences of others feeling overwhelmed when trying to learn something new, have reinforced this belief.

The principles of slow growth always allow for a moment of pause and observation. We want to instill in our students the ability to stop, take a breath, and really look at what’s in front of them. This skill is invaluable not just in coding, but in problem-solving of all kinds.

Let me share a little anecdote that illustrates this point…

[The speaker then shares a story about helping young children resolve conflicts over a wagon, emphasizing the importance of helping people become more aware of their experiences as they occur.]

Applying Slow Growth to Tech Support

This slow growth approach isn’t just for kids learning to share toys. It’s equally applicable when helping adults navigate technology challenges. Let me give you an example from my own life.

My mother, who I’m incredibly proud of, has been navigating the ever-changing landscape of technology interfaces as she’s gotten older. It can be challenging for her to figure out what seems like basic tasks to those of us who are more tech-savvy. I’ve often found myself in the position of helping her troubleshoot various issues, from photo editing to exporting files.

In these situations, it’s common for the person seeking help to be frustrated. They might be under time pressure, tired, or dealing with other stressors. This is where the slow growth approach really shines. By recognizing these factors and the overall context, we can better assist them.

Sometimes, this means gently interjecting to help them slow down and focus. For instance, I might say, “Okay, can you tell me exactly what you see on your screen right now?” or “What does the error message say, word for word?” This helps cut through the overwhelming flood of information and emotions, allowing us to pinpoint the actual issue.

The goal here isn’t just to solve the immediate problem, but to plant seeds of increased awareness and capability. By guiding them through the process of identifying and articulating the issue, we’re empowering them to approach future problems with more confidence and clarity.

Building a Community of Learners

This is the kind of approach we want to foster in our can code community. We aim to be available and open, serving both those who can afford to support us financially and those who can’t. Our slow growth starts with community - reaching out to support anyone learning something new, troubleshooting issues, seeking consultation or advice on technology, or diving into full courses on web development and beyond.

Original Transcript

  What is can code? Can code is many things related to software development.
  As an organization and as a business, we are interested in empowering people.
  And so we intend to build a slow growth community effort to empower any person to command technology.
  We say slow growth because it is also our intention to rest our foundation on at least one principle and an approach.
  And that is that in order to go fast, we should try to go slow.
  And what that means doesn't or doesn't mean is that it does not mean that we don't go fast.
  It doesn't mean that we will not be moving fast.
  But it means that the time we take to do our work with intention and with care, which includes attention to details that would inform us when we need to be agile, when we need to make trade offs, when we need to band aid something instead of making it perfect.
  But that all of that slow intention informs us to be tooling ourselves to, for example, be able to set up the work that will come to make that better if the trade off needed to be a Band Aid, it is important that the foundation is slow and is not rushed to raise people up in a sense of operation default and by necessity being rushing and burning out people, but empowering them to take this slow intention, to move fast, to be able to be still and stable in the tumultuous currency of the business of software.
  We will all have to put up with it if we want to work in the industry.
  But we also grow the businesses that are part of this industry.
  We don't have to stop creating something that we think we can create and do better by principles that go against that stream.
  And it's not going against the stream.
  It's sitting on the side of the stream, fishing and enjoying what we can see, passing by and seeing when that floating log comes along that we recognize, or a boat, as it were, a slow growth community effort to empower any person to commend technology.
  I am always trying my best not to quote ratatouille, anyone can code, but it is true, I feel.
  Anyone can code if it's what they are wanting to do.
  My experiences of imposter syndrome and the shared experiences from others being overwhelmed, trying to learn something new.
  The principles of slow growth always allow for a moment of pause, observation, because we want to understand the reality and we want to instill that in our students, to empower them to be able to stop.
  Take a breath and look.
  One of my favorite moments working with young children was a common conflict resolution opportunity.
  Imagine, if you will, two year olds using little red wagons on a farm.
  Imagine there are two of these toddlers walking towards the big red, large barn.
  And inside that barna where the wagons usually rest, there's one lonely red wagon to which both children arrive near simultaneously.
  And they both want that wagon.
  They both go for the handle.
  They both nearly reach at the same time.
  One gets the handle, one gets the bar connecting the handle to the wagon.
  And as you can imagine, potential heartbreak and crying.
  And I want the wagon while I want the wagon.
  And while much of what I've seen from our cultural, societal view of children, people developing, is that they don't.
  We don't typically do the work to help them be more aware of their experiences as they occur, because we don't think that they can understand it, so therefore we don't express it.
  And so it takes them longer to understand it.
  And what I'm getting at is that I have helped children over decades with those conflicts to stop, understand the situation, talk to each other, and come to resolution, and not by us mandating, well, coming over and saying whether it's, oh, you should all share, so blah, blah, blah, or, well, he had it first.
  And stop fighting.
  Or you said, or even trying to be, oh, I'm so nice to everybody that I can't even be helping anyone guide anyone to a decision.
  But that's that get.
  I gave those children that moment by first of all, if it was needed, that I should be okay.
  Just to moment.
  Just a moment.
  Lucas.
  Just a moment.
  Hannah, can you wait just a moment? I'm sorry.
  Just that people do not understand how effective it is to be speaking to your child directly without being direct.
  But human to human, that's the first step.
  Now, I'm not.
  I'm not going to go on and on about early childhood development at this moment.
  That's another topic.
  The point here is that there is a slow growth approach that empowers people to look at what their problem is.
  Whether it's my.
  My mother, who I am so proud of, and proud of the fact that she's proud of herself for being, maybe sometimes stereotypically, even a person who, as interfaces and computers, software technology has advanced.
  She has been getting into her upper middle age and is naturally confused by newer and newer interfaces.
  And it can be very challenging to figure out how to do what seems like a basic thing.
  And I remember times where I would help her with trying to troubleshoot some issue with maybe some kind of photo editing.
  She's trying to do with a.
  I think it was Picasso at the time and, you know, there's some error when trying to export a bunch of photos.
  Let's say I don't remember the specific example, but it's common in those situations to because the person who is trying to get this working is frustrated.
  Maybe they, you know, there are other factors involved with, you know, why it's frustrating outside of the fact that it's not working.
  Time pressures, maybe it is actually for a project.
  Maybe, you know, they're tired and need to get bed, which, you know, that's something to address too.
  Sometimes the slow growth is recognizing that you need to go sleep or you need to eat or drink water or a myriad of other things.
  The point here is that recognize that those are factors but also recognize the context.
  And the reality is, you know, if the case is that, you know, in this case, this person asking me for help, then I also, as I slow down and observe that I sometimes needed to use some sort of technique to assert, to interject because in those states, I find that that a person is often trying to, is needing to slow down because they're jumping from information piece to information piece and sometimes need to be interjected for a moment.
  And that's where I may be assertive as the person is also trying to explain what they know about, you know, this problem, what they were trying to do.
  But sometimes it will come out very like unclear what all happened.
  And of course, that's also where, you know, there are opportunities to help fill in the gap as you reply, to use terminologies that will help.
  It's like a spice or a seasoning for them to add to their explanation that, you know, that makes it clear upfront.
  And, you know, regardless, there can, there's often I find a need at that first to interject at a time to say, okay, well, so are you in your program right now? Okay.
  Okay, so, you know, what do you see right now? Is there, can you tell me like where you're at right now? Okay.
  And, you know, of course, obviously technology tools, screen sharing, yada, yada.
  But I'm talking about helping my mother from as long as I can remember.
  But yeah, in the early times and the way she's grown through it is that going from, it's like the slowing down is interjecting, helping them to slow down by interjecting at times and going, okay, well, okay, but for when I say, what does the warning say exactly? And the person starts going on about, well, I was trying to do this thing where I sized up and I went to this other program and I closed and.
  Okay.
  Okay, cool, cool.
  But what, so do you still have the warning message up from the error? Like what does it say? Well, so there's a menu.
  Well, okay, yeah, but what does it say? Like there is a bit of training and this is where it was with children and it really, I will not, I'm trying not to go off too far on that subject, but it is very related in again, that cultural perception that we can't help our children to have this intelligence if we don't provide it also for them to absorb.
  So expect them, I expect my mom can get this because it's not, this is the thing is that when people are frustrated with technology and it is overwhelming, they, it's not that they can't do it, it's because it's overwhelming.
  They fail, feel like they can't.
  But if there is one seed that we can give them for an increase of awareness of their capabilities and what technology really is, there's so much abstraction and it's very fancy.
  It can feel like magic, but it is very empowering to give, give them a little bit of control over one little thing.
  And there are plenty of subtle sideways to plant those seeds, but as they come to you for help, as you're there to help, part of that help is also interjecting and doing that training early on to both be in the discipline of that slow and stop to be able to move in optimal directions and at the right speed for the right speed, if that makes sense.
  So again, the slow growth approach has me interjecting in those early days so that my mother, who I've seen come incrementally a long way in being able to discover a solution for herself to where it's actually infrequent these days that I am assisting her with a technology and she uses her Mac that she got a few years ago that she's loved and she, you know, she uses.
  And this is, I, you know, I mean I use everything across the board, but I do think that even though there's a shift, a learning curve for, you know, I think most and hard to say these days, but people my mom's age, you know, and my age depending on socioeconomics, had more access and this is still true as far as cost access to Windows machine.
  And until we discovered Linux, that was pretty much it because that's all you could afford.
  So my parents experience with technology is on that platform and so there's, there's a huge transition in, to me they seem, they're very different, obviously, but when you understand the basic structure.
  It's just a matter of figuring out how to say it.
  And I will say, I absolutely still hate windows.
  The places where I would go to find something.
  It's nonsensical, trying to find just a simple setting, inconsistent, etcetera.
  This is to the point here that I think that at least as an interface for the common user as well as the not so common users, it does fit the bill.
  And my mom had a transition there as well.
  But now, no, she uses that daily.
  She does her writes, her book, books and photo editing.
  She's a wonderful photographer and writer and many other things.
  But you know, she's an iPhone user too, and we've been through many different rounds of helping her with various issues and tasks with mobile devices, etc.
  Etcetera.
  But that's just one instance of one kind of student that we may have at Cancode, but that's one, that's one kind cancode.
  As a community wants to be available, open, we want to be able to serve people who can afford to keep keep us afloat, but we will also want to serve people who can't afford it.
  We want to make our slow growth from starting with community.
  We want to reach out and be able to support anyone who's learning something new, someone who's trying to troubleshoot issues, someone who wants consultation on some technology, someone who wants advice, someone who wants guidance, someone who wants to take on full courses and run through a whole web development, certification and so many other things.
  One of the fun and interesting ideas that grant and I discussed a long time ago, and I know I had written on not so long ago, spoken with Ethan and Tashaun, I believe as well, is the idea of a slow growth community school, virtual school, whatever you want to call it that, or rather a business.
  So can code as a software business, software education, business as a school, as an organization, provides courses upon very unique tracks.
  One unique track being that you have an app idea you don't know how to code, but you would like to learn how to code.
  And it would be really neat if you did it yourself, but you really, really wanted to take a course that will get you there, that will also help you build your app, that that app will be the produced outcome and that we as a business and organization are there to support you and work with you as a team in a consultation, in a professional sense, in that we will take it from where you are and adjust where necessary as you need to adapt to where.
  If you're learning something and you think at the beginning oh yeah, I can take this on and that on, and then, you know, the organization will take on the rest and you go, this is way too much, two months down the road.
  And then it'll adjust from there.
  The idea being that you go through a course that is teaching you how to build the things in parallel with the actual thing being built.
  That the end result will be you having a thing being built and that you help to build part of it or all of it.
  And even if it's the tiniest bit, it all depends on what you want to learn and what you want to get out of it, and that it can work within your time and your energy.
  And at the end of it, the result could also be that you join the team of Cancode and then that is a slow growth of can code support, Cancode engineers and developers.
  And of course this.
  If we're talking about running a business, then that's where it's like, yes, it's about software, but it becomes about many more things.
  Project management, product design, testing, QA, on and on where the business could be built.
  Slowly, purely from community, I want to build a software company that is not intended on getting rich.
  I was intent on empowering people and I want to get people excited about using technology.
  So that's the basic idea.
  With Cancun, there's so much more I could say.
  And by my rubber ducky timer, I still have at least 20 minutes or so available.
  You know what? That's great, actually.
  There's no reason I can't just mute the mic and come back later.
  But yeah, I think that's it.
  That's all I want to say about can code right now.
  There's some big and little things coming down the pipeline.
  There will be a virtual community home where we can communicate online, both privately and publicly, and share things, make posts, etcetera, etcetera.
  And there will be more information and ways to go about reaching out to can code for our services or information, or a number of other things, newsletters, etcetera.
  For now, the today I learned log is where can code updates will be placed.
  I hope to generate some interest in what I'm doing and what I intend to do.
  I hope it's something that other people get excited about.
  I need to include some, some folks who I know might be interested.
  Grant, for example.
  Ethan.
  Nate.
  I'll make a list.
  But I think just to finish this off, even though I might mute and come back, I want to read out loud what the sort of prompt I'm giving to Claude is right now for this this very post.
  It reads as follows.
  Can you write a developer education article entry from this transcript? I would like this to be rewritten in a casual, pleasant, and intelligent style.
  Be as detailed and lengthy as possible.
  Add additional specifics where possible, but be accurate.
  Be kind, patient, informative, guiding with an interest in how things work.
  Our intention here is to share in a way that is not overly excited, but encouraging for others to try things.
  Try to vary your style throughout the post.
  Pontificate more, but not so cheesy.
  Try to use more of my phrasing from the transcript if possible.
  In fact, be as verbatim as is logically possible.
  And yeah, also side note there, I'm just scratching this surface with anthropic and Claude, this is, you know, so far, just the the prompt text.
  I believe I'd have to look at the interface.
  It's, it's not the key name for it in the, at least in the data sent in messages to the anthropic library.
  The SDKs create messages function.
  But yes, there are, there actually, there's quite a few other features I wanted to try out.
  Yeah, I think, I think I'm gonna leave it at that, I guess.
  My final message to anyone who, who is interested in slow growth ideas and wants to participate and get in on this early building, reach out to me down the bottom of the page.
  There should be my email, GitHub, LinkedIn, or you can reach out and say, hey, love to talk to you.
  All right, take care.

Claude prompt

  Can you write a developer education article entry from this transcript? I would like this to be re-written in a casual, pleasant and intelligent style. Be as detailed and lengthy as possible. Add additional specifics where possible, but be accurate. Be kind, patient, informative, guiding, with an interest in how things work. Our intention here is to share in a way that is not overly excited, but encouraging for others to try things. Try to vary your style throughout the post. Pontificate more, but not so cheesy. Try to use more of my phrasing from the transcript, if possible. In fact, be as verbatim as is logically possible.