Engaging Developers with Edutrainment | Dale Meredith | Ep 7

DevEducate: The Art of Teaching Developers at Scale

This week Dale Meredith, cybersecurity expert and recovering Batman addict, joins me on the show to talk about how to engage developers with “edutrainment”, how to work in branding with developer content and education, and how he came to own Wayne Enterprises.

Talking Points

• Ways branding can be incorporated into developer content
• What branding really means (hint: it's not a logo)
• How do you figure out if developers respond well to your content?
• Keeping developers engaged instead of falling asleep
• Why Batman is the perfect character for Dale’s brand of education

Lightly edited for context

“I've sat through live courses as well as online courses before where I'm just like… bored to death and I'm like, get to the point!” – Dale

“[Branding] is every single touchpoint your customer or your learner has with your marketing or sales material. It's how it makes them feel.” – Kamran

“When it comes to a developer relations program within a product business, we sort of leave it to the individuals that are writing and we don’t really talk about how we could incorporate our brand and our positioning and our marketing strategy and flow it into our developer education.” – Kamran

“When we can associate an emotion to learning, it sticks with us longer. And so if I can get you to laugh, you're gonna remember it.” – Dale

“I've had students come back to me in the past and say, ‘You know what? I was taking the exam, the question came up and I actually laughed out loud because I remembered what it is you said. And it made me remember immediately what the answer was.’” – Dale

“The best way for people to learn is not to drill the information in over and over and over, but to create.” – Dale

“I just love catching people off guard. I’ll on purpose teach the wrong thing and be like, I'm just kidding you folks. You know, just to get their attention. Because they'll be like wait a minute, that's not right.” – Dale

“I've actually purchased the name Wayne Enterprises here in the state of Utah. That is one of my business names.” – Dale

“If you wanna learn something, teach it to somebody. It'll force you to learn it.” – Dale

Links

• Dale’s Ethical Hacking courses on Pluralsight
• Get Dale’s Certified Ethical Hacker Exam Guide
• Dale Dumbs IT Down
• Why are memories attached to emotions so strong?
• The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory
• Principles of Public Speaking course: Aspects of Vocal Delivery
• One of Dale’s favorite images: Batman Sitting on Throne