Sue Smith, Senior Learning Experience Manager at Fastly came by to chat with me about the state of education in the tech sector. Sue has a genuine passion for education and can take just about any area of the tech landscape, dive-in, and begin helping onboard others to some very complex topics. Sue and I share a concern about the amount of investment enterprises and startups make across their operations and teams, and question that we all have enough discipline to consider ourselves engineers.
Sue energizes me because she cares about education deeply. Even my wife said, “I adore Sue”, as she walked by after our conversation. She doesn’t say that about many of my API conversations. ;-) I want to have Sue back and talk more about the intersection of AI and education, but I want to dig more into her reasons why she didn’t see herself having a future back when she started. I find this relevant for my own personal reasons, but I also think it is a shared emotion that spans multiple generations right now–technology is something that often makes it worse.
Education is the single most important issue we struggle with in the technological landscape, and isn’t something AI will “just fix”–it goes deeper than that. I am playing around with various ways to shape my API guidance to help fill a few of the cracks I see, but I want to have Sue back to explore more of what she’s seen with learning and her time with Glitch, but then also what that looks like as a cross-cutting function at Fastly. I am determined to lay the foundation for API guidance that will weather the ever-changing investment cycles, and resist the AI obfuscation. I feel Sue has her finger on what matters most on the ground across our enterprises.
