Learning at Fastly: A Shared Experience

My job at Fastly is making the product easy to learn. I joined the company along with the rest of the Glitch team a couple of years ago, and my default move when teaching web skills is to reach for Glitch – it’s a powerful tool! Since starting a new role working on the Fastly learning experience, I’ve been figuring out how to convey the value and purpose of our tech in a way that’s meaningful to a wide range of people – ideally through practical steps. We’ve taken a slightly unusual approach that I’d love to share in this post.

Inside out

We decided to develop some new baseline learning resources by initially using them in employee training. Earlier this year we ran live training for teams around the company, with the goal of getting as many of our coworkers as possible to try the product. We set the expectation that the training should be suitable for absolutely everyone who works at Fastly, regardless of background or role.

Like most tech companies, calendars at Fastly are pretty full! People juggle priorities with all the usual distractions of a distributed workplace. So we decided to cap each session at one hour, with follow-up support available, but with the aim that most could complete the steps at the time. I always hesitate to put an extra call on the calendar, but if we’d just made the resources available self-serve, I believe the uptake would have been much lower. Setting an hour aside gave people permission to say, “This time is for learning” and hopefully not feel so obligated to pay attention to whatever else was going on.

Removing friction

When you teach developer skills, especially to people with less prior experience, it’s ideal if you can get them to a quick win as smoothly as possible. I didn’t want to begin these sessions by asking participants to install a developer environment or use a terminal – those are intimidating, unpredictable tasks that can alienate people. Spending excessive time on set-up tasks before you actually interact with the thing you’re interested in can also kill enthusiasm. Using Glitch removes the need to set up local tooling, or go through a deployment flow to get an app online – you click a button and immediately have a live website you can edit in the browser.

While the core user base for much of our tech is engineers, I always try to keep the door open to anyone who wants to learn. Trialing learning resources with a mixed audience is also a useful stress test! If it’s accessible to people with less experience, that just makes it easier for those at a more advanced stage.

Providing context 

We started by getting everyone to remix a Glitch site, then make some small changes to it. We set up a Fastly CDN service for this new site and measured the loading speeds. We used standard browser tools to test performance and explore caching information in the network requests. We then played around with some of our service settings while jumping in and out of the Glitch app to make edits. It may not have been the most advanced CDN training ever devised, but it gave people an intuitive sense of what our tech is for, a foundation they could build on, and the resources to teach others what they’d learned!

Web technologies exist within an ecosystem of other technologies, each one made meaningful in part by how it connects to the world around it. This makes it most effective to teach developer tech in context, giving learners a sense of what each piece contributes to the whole. That’s something Glitch brings to Fastly – it helps people learn about our product in the context of a website.

Learning together

Capturing feedback during live training helped me identify the challenging parts of adopting Fastly, the concepts that were harder to grasp, and the places people got stuck – it helped me figure out what needed to be taught. At every session, I’d be asked at least one question I didn’t know the answer to, which gave me the opportunity to develop my own understanding and iterate on the content. We came out of this process with a learning experience we had user-tested and much more clarity on how to effectively teach our tech to users. We also generated a rich channel of UX feedback we were able to action, making the product easier for everyone.

Most of our sessions were with specific teams, but we had a couple for individual signups. The most successful, highly engaged session was hosted by two of our Employee Resource Groups. The Fastly Blackly and WAGE (Women and Gender Equality) ERGs held a training that anyone at the company was welcome to join. I’ve been reflecting on why this was the most successful session, and I believe it comes down to the value of creating a shared space for learning, where people come together around a common goal. 

Being able to create a learning pathway like this is something I’ve been keen to try for many years and I’m very grateful to be doing it at Fastly. My hope is to build a culture of learning that enables more within our internal and external community to make the web.

You can try the Learn Website Delivery tutorial and Glitch project we developed through this training yourself!