ngadde / how-sessions

Home of the Hands On Walkthrough (HOW) Sessions. Microsoft Developer Support Team

Welcome to HOW Sessions

What are HOW Sessions?

HOW Sessions stands for Hands On Walkthrough sessions where knowledgeable consultants deliver live coding sessions walking the attendants through the steps needed to implement a particular technology for a specific scenario.

These sessions can be targeted to any technology stack. Here are some core focus areas

Anything Azure (Well... we'll see what works) Microservices Containerization & Orchestration Cloud Native Development

Benefits of a HOW Session:

• Guided documentation: Tech/Tools change too frequently, instead of click here, goto dropdown, etc... it would say Create new MVC app from dotnet cli, or download npm package and install globally. These docs can have links to docs.microsoft.com or other resources, allowing the consultant to learn.

• Less Slides More Live Coding/Work: Any Slides or Markdown should be to "set the stage" for the live coding session. less artifacts that we need to maintain, the easier it is to manage the life of the session content. Hands on keyboards is always the optimal way to retain knowledge.

• Pair Programming: Attendees can get stuck, depending on their skill level, implementing pair programming allows consultant to troubleshoot less potential problems, and allows them to pair up different skill levels to potentially allow attendees to figure out issues. This will be a suggestion not a requirement.

• Attendees keep work: Work is done on attendee laptops and or Azure subscriptions. All work created will stay with the customer.

Tenants of HOW Sessions

Live Coding over Slides

Typical Workshop content is heavy on slides and discussion with sprinkles of canned demos.  Depending on the crowd, attendees tend to lose interest (Zone out) during these presentations.

Engaging attendees through Hands On Walkthroughs ensures three key goals:

• Active participation throughout delivery

• Greater retention of content (Hands on Keyboard)

• Attendance skills are appropriate for content

Instructor guidance over Hands On Labs

After attendees are lulled to sleep from death by PowerPoint, a typical Workshop will provide Hands On Lab (HOL) content for students to complete.  HOL labs are infamous for containing steps and screenshots that are out of date, leading to student frustration and lack of confidence in delivery.

Instructor based scripts provide the following benefits:

• General guidance and reference document links to official Microsoft documentation

• Docs are created using markdown language and live within Git repository allowing for easy updates and ability to accept Pull Requests from community

• Great readiness format for FTE learning.

Pair Programming over Isolation

Students pair up based on skills highlighting team based skills and collaboration.

Pair Programming provides the following benefits:

• Less skilled students can be paired with someone with higher skills

• Less overall student machines where something could go wrong.

• Two people troubleshoot issues better than one.  Less instructor troubleshooting

Consultant Know-how over canned demos

Workshop demos tend to become out of date quickly and rely on instructor knowledge and intervention to be successful.  HOW Sessions rely on both instructor scripts and consultant know-how to demonstrate the desired content.

This provides the following benefits:

• Content is always current, based on consultants readiness

• Removes the need to continually update slides, demos, and HOLs