Thursday 14 June 2018

Building my own Learning System - Part 7

Building my own Learning System - Part 7

Learning

Introduction

Since I last blogged about my learning system I’ve started using it at BrightGen, for example to onboard developers onto our BrightMedia accelerator, where it has been generally well received. Not least by me, as it means that I don’t need to spend multiple hours with every developer, going through the same content which they may or may not be listening to. I’m also seeing some customers indicating that they’d like to pick up development tasks in BrightMedia projects. Thanks to my original design decision of distributing content across multiple endpoints, I can expose content to upskill the customers without giving away internal BrightGen content, or them even knowing that other content exists.

I’ve added in some features that are useful, to me at least, including:

  • Filtering by topic
  • Executing as a user (the github repo has the concept of running as a specific email address, as it’s unauthenticated)
  • Added an info modal, detailing the recent changes, which I keep forgetting to update, so if you use the unmanaged package to install it will likely be at least one version out of date :)

The great thing about building my own learning system though, is that I am learning by building it.

Learning by Building

As I’m adding features to my learning system I’m also learning more. Not just the Salesforce features that I expected to learn about, such as using the latest standard lightning components, but other areas that aren’t even Salesforce related.

Most recently I’ve been learning more about how to operate on Github. Up until now I’ve just typically created a repo when I wrote a blog post and added to it when I wrote another blog post on the same topic. Now that I’ve got a project that I’m trying to keep a bit more organised, I’m :

  • Adding details of fixes/features into CHANGELOG.md (I’m pretty good on this one - much better than my modal. I probably need to automate updating the modal from the change log).
  • Creating releases
  • Adding diffs to CHANGELOG.md that show all changes between releases 

This wasn’t something that I expected when I started working on my learning system and, once again, shows the value of side projects. I knew that I’d learn, but surprised even myself.

Related Information

All previous posts about the learning system have moved to a dedicated page on my blog. The code is available in the following repositories.

 

 

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