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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hi. I'm Dan Knauss from MultiDots, and this is the Publish Press podcast. I'm here with Steve Burge, founder and owner of Publish Press. How are doing, Steve?
Steve Burge:Hey. Great. Thanks, Dan. So me and you have known each other a good long time now, but I guess today, I've known even longer. Me and Jen go back twenty plus years.
Steve Burge:We both used to be web design trainers, and Jen still is. Her experience as a web trainer spans just about every era of the web. She started teaching CSS and HTML twenty plus years ago and is still doing it now. She fervently believes that that is the foundation that every web developer needs to know. And things like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Webflow, Squarespace, they come and go, but the essential skills remain.
Steve Burge:And so we ended up talking about her web design career starting with in person training through videos, through mixed classes, and then through massive, really popular classes on platforms like LinkedIn and Front End Masters, and then ended talking about her her newest project, which is helping survivors of trafficking to become junior web developers. I think you'll find this a fascinating conversation.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. There's a lot of lot of fascinating information in there. And I think we got some some really valuable tidbits from from Jen's long experience in the educational space on what makes effective teaching, what makes a course really a good one that's going to have positive learning outcomes. So take a listen. This is a really enjoyable conversation we had.
Steve Burge:Hey, Jen. Welcome to the PublishPress Podcast.
Jen Kramer:Hey. Thanks for having me, Steve. Great to see you.
Steve Burge:Equally. We have known each other, oh, twenty plus years now.
Jen Kramer:Yep. Yep. Happy happy Joomla days.
Steve Burge:Oh, man. Up through the all the ups and downs of the web starting with me and you were training people how to use Joomla together.
Jen Kramer:We were.
Steve Burge:And then HTML and CSS. Mhmm. Bootstrap. And now you've moved on through teaching at Harvard.
Jen Kramer:Yes.
Steve Burge:Teaching at LinkedIn and now the era of no code tools.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Which is great. Yeah.
Steve Burge:But we haven't talked for a couple of years now. Do you mind catching us up on what you're doing right now?
Jen Kramer:Sure. So these days, I am the director of learning design and technology for Annie Cannon's. It's a nonprofit boot camp that is devoted to serving human trafficking survivors. So our students have previously been trafficked, and we are teaching them job skills so that they can go on and make money and not have to ever go back into trafficking situations ever again. And our students come in.
Jen Kramer:They go through our introductory course. As as they get to the three so called advanced modules, we actually pay them to come to class. They are paid
Steve Burge:Oh, really?
Jen Kramer:$20 an hour, 20 5 hours a week to be in class to help help pay for apartments and food and all the rest of that so that they have time to study and get up to speed in the field. And then we do our best to get them placed into various internships or other jobs along the way and get them started as junior developers, junior software developers, full stack.
Steve Burge:Oh, so how long is the how long is the course? How long is the boot camp they enroll in?
Jen Kramer:It's a little bit more than a year that they spend with us. They so in addition to the introductory HTML, CSS, little JavaScript, they do React. They also do back end, specifically like Node and JavaScript and so forth working with databases. And then they do an independent study where they can focus on expanding their skills into whatever direction they want, whether they some of them decide that they don't really like coding and they wanna go into project management. Others of them are just like, yeah.
Jen Kramer:Software engineering is it. I want more of that. So they're going in a bunch of different directions.
Steve Burge:So you've been doing this for a while. You've seen people graduate and look for jobs after this?
Jen Kramer:I I have been there now for almost a year. Okay. Just a few weeks short of a year at this point.
Steve Burge:What kind of jobs are people ready for after they after they graduate?
Jen Kramer:They're ready for junior developer jobs in terms of one one of the things that we have at Anti Cannon's are are ticket systems and such. We actually build a little bit of software that's used in the human trafficking space. And so our students actually get real world experience working on tickets and contributing code to a real world product. So many of them will go on to internships with some of the companies that we work with and some of them will find jobs on their own. It is not a good market for junior developers as we all know right now.
Jen Kramer:So yeah, some some of them don't have anything immediately leaving any canons, but we continue to work with them.
Steve Burge:Okay. So if someone's listening to the podcast and is interested in hiring junior developers, you have a pipeline to some enthusiastic, well trained people?
Jen Kramer:Yes, please. Yes, please. So
Steve Burge:this is a capstone of sorts to really quite a career that you've had through through Harvard, through LinkedIn, being a an independent teacher. Mhmm. What does the market look like for being an independent teacher these days? I know people are out there hustling to get their courses on Udemy or looking to sell their courses on social media. What does the situation look like for someone trying to be an independent teacher these days?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. I think it's pretty it's pretty tough at this moment in time. I I think a lot of people see teaching as a way of making money. And some of us who grew up in education know nothing could be further from the truth, but but at the same time. So back in the seventies and eighties, independent people who wanted to get noticed would write a book, and they would get an actual, like, paper dead tree book published somewhere, and that's how they became known in the consultant space.
Jen Kramer:I think what we see today is that people think that, okay, so I'll have my Teachable or Kajabi class or something or Udemy class or I'll just start my YouTube channel and everyone will understand everything that I'm saying. One of the big drawbacks that I think is happening in that space is that education actually is a very well established field that's been around for hundreds of years. We know how people learn. But we in the tech field are a little bit on the arrogance side and think that, oh, well, I know this thing and of course I can teach it perfectly. But there's a there's a lot actually to be gained by by getting some background in how to teach in order to be really effective at what you do.
Jen Kramer:There's a lot of non effective teaching that's out there. So that's that would be the first piece of advice that I would have for people who think that they wanna teach. Go read some books and go take some classes on how to be a teacher.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Back when we were running a training company and me and you were working together, we used to have a an in house motto that we would hire teachers and train them in web development, and that would generally produce a more effective teacher than taking a web developer and teaching them how to train. It's it's kind of innate that you have the the patience or the the ability to take a complex topic and explain it to people. And a lot of web developers just don't have that mindset perhaps.
Jen Kramer:I think that's definitely true. And I think the other thing that makes a really effective teacher in the space is to go back and reexamine all of your preconceived notions. So you learned HTML somewhere along the way and you have your opinions about whatever, some certain element means and how it should be used. Go back and read the documentation. I can pretty much guarantee you you're gonna learn something new that you did not know previously and that you can then bring to your teaching.
Jen Kramer:So making sure that you actually understand what you're doing is really important and not just sort of blowing off some of those questions that come from your students about why did you say more about that. Why did you why did you say that thing? You have to be prepared for for answers, and you need to be right.
Dan Knauss:Did you have a background in education before you got into the technical stuff? Or what what's your how did you learn the teaching skills?
Jen Kramer:I I'm one of those like, teaching is actually how I learn. So when I was when I was in high school, I taught flute lessons, music lessons. When I was in college, I tutored the students who were around me. When I was in grad school, I tutored, the people who were around me. That's how I got to know my homework.
Jen Kramer:If I could explain it to somebody else, then I felt like I had actually mastered things. And so and and I had spent all this money on graduate school. And when I graduated, it was became my immediate goal to earn back all the money that I had paid for my degree by teaching at the school where I had graduated from at Marlborough College. So I and I did that. So I I changed that goal a couple times over Nice.
Jen Kramer:Teaching there. So a lot of what I learned was actually along the way. While I was at Harvard, one of the wonderful things about being a Harvard employee is that you can take classes for $40 each through the
Steve Burge:Harvard School.
Dan Knauss:Oh, really?
Jen Kramer:So I said, cool. Cool. I'm going to go do the certificate in learning design and technology. And it was so eye opening for me. One of the first things we did was read a book called backwards design.
Jen Kramer:And I remember reading this. One of the things I had to do was take notes online. There was an online note kind of thing. And I kept making comments like, this is UX. This is UX.
Jen Kramer:These are all the things that we do in UX. So and then learning, like actually learning adult learning theory were thoughts that I'd had for years that actually, like, brought together a whole lot of things that I thought about during that time. So, yeah, it took me, like, twenty years of teaching in the field to actually finally get my formal education. It made such a difference, and I wish I had done it years earlier. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So you worked as at Harvard as a HTML CSS web design teacher?
Jen Kramer:And and I taught a lot of so I taught several courses on on CSS and advanced CSS. I taught I taught content management systems, which WordPress was a part of that series, and I taught a lot of educational technology classes as well.
Steve Burge:So the through the the through line through twenty years or so seems to be HTML and CSS that maybe the the platforms I mean, Joomla has come and gone. Maybe WordPress will come and go soon. Bootstrap, you're on to perhaps some a little bit of no code tools now. Yep. But the one thing that's remained constant through through all those years through through Harvard, through working at LinkedIn, through teaching the survivors now has been HTML and CSS?
Jen Kramer:That's right. That's right. Because the three fundamental languages of the browser are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When I started in February working in this field, there was HTML. CSS wasn't really it was around, but it wasn't a supported thing by a browser.
Jen Kramer:And and we were using Dreamweaver back in those days. Dreamweaver three, specifically, when it was part of Macromedia, actually. And so what I realized early on was if you stick with those fundamentals and you know the fundamental part of how the browser works, the other software is gonna come and go, which it has. Like, you know, it was really it was sort of like my my first experience with software death when when Dreamweaver left left for other places. And I was really sad about it for, twenty years like, till I found Webflow.
Jen Kramer:Now I now I feel like I'm I'm back to my younger self again. But, you know
Steve Burge:That's one experience every web developer has to go through is the the death of their first favorite tool. And if you if you're around long enough like the three of us have, then we've experienced the death of our favorite tool several times.
Jen Kramer:Yes. Yeah. For sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but yes. Like, Internet Explorer six, we were really glad to see it go, but, you know, other things not so much.
Dan Knauss:If you think about those fundamentals though, like HTML and CSS and JavaScript as your foundational tools, maybe there's less pain. Maybe there's too much change in some periods, But
Jen Kramer:Right. Right.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. That's
Jen Kramer:Right. But if you understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, if you understand how data moves, it's moving around, right, between whatever, between through APIs or back and forth to a database or however the data is going, where it's stored, and how it's being displayed, you actually have the foundation for whatever comes next.
Steve Burge:So the actual, the through line of what you're teaching has changed on the surface, but fundamentally, it's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that's been the through line for twenty years. What about the actual format? We started teaching in person, like, twenty years ago, actually having people sit down in a computer lab with machines in front of them. But you've been through, an ebook era, a YouTube era, LinkedIn era. Can you take us through the different methods you've used to teach people over the years?
Jen Kramer:Sure. Yeah. Well, when I when I started again in in February, there were no learning management systems for higher ed. So we would use like AOL Instant Messenger, and we'd have like a we'd actually run chat class on occasion on AOL instant messenger. I remember building my static HTML websites in Dreamweaver to teach students.
Jen Kramer:There was no other there were no other options. Right? So so that's where we started. Right? As as we moved move forward oh, and by the way, Marlboro was very much ahead of their time.
Jen Kramer:They had a so called hybrid format. So every other weekend, we were in class. We were in class Friday night and all day Saturday.
Steve Burge:Then So for for people that don't know, Marlborough is a university up in New Hampshire?
Jen Kramer:In in Vermont. And, unfortunately, it's it's no longer with us. Talk about death of death of software. How about death of university? They did finally go out of business, unfortunately, like a lot of places in higher ed at this point.
Jen Kramer:Small small New England colleges that are in financial difficulties. So they they they left us, I think, around the pandemic.
Steve Burge:Oh, so you were doing hybrid classes where the students would be at home. You were using AOL to talk with them, and then they would physically come into the university to to have part of their education in person?
Jen Kramer:Every other weekend. Yeah. So this was in the early two thousands, and we'd have people that, in some cases would fly. I had a friend who took a train up from Pennsylvania, you know, every other weekend, drive from all over to come and join us to be in person. And then they would go home again and we would we would work on and try to collaborate like through what we had.
Jen Kramer:So we had email, we had AOL, instant messenger, you know, that kind of stuff. We'd collaborate sort of in between classes, which was good. It gave me a mental model really early on of how learning works remotely and and to have done it at that point in time. As I as I mean, as time progressed, right, we eventually got learning management systems and we got by the time I got to Harvard Extension, I was one of the very first instructors in some of the first classes that were wholly online. In other words, where I
Steve Burge:was Oh, so important. Yeah. So the Harvard classes dispensed of the in person aspect of it and moved entirely online?
Jen Kramer:It and and early on again. So this would be, like, 2012, '20 '13 when we were recording videos, like video lectures. I'd have students be coding along with me, you know, like here's the starting files, follow along with the video, code along with me kind of thing, and then coming up with assignments and ways for them to turn those in all online. And that was that was shocking at the time. So this is the Harvard Extension School, which is designed to be remote remote learning.
Jen Kramer:And we had sometimes as many as 150 people in class.
Steve Burge:Oh, wow. So this was a a sizable jump from the initial Marlboro class.
Jen Kramer:Right. Right. Yeah. And ten years ten years further from Marlboro. Yeah.
Jen Kramer:Yep. So so so
Steve Burge:so you moved to fully online classes really quite early on. I mean, the technology wasn't even really available back in 2012 to do this very easily.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. They Harvard had built their own platform at that point in time, which was
Steve Burge:Oh, okay.
Jen Kramer:Truly, truly awful. I would record videos and I'd put them on Vimeo, and then I'd have to, like, email this guy who would then put them in my class. But by 2015, we had Canvas, which is something of an industry standard at this point for higher ed. So so then I then I was able to build out my own classes and experiment with what is effective, which is always really the question in in teaching. What is effective?
Jen Kramer:Not right or wrong. What works? Yeah.
Steve Burge:So around that time, I think me and you were dabbling in ebooks as well. Kindle and Amazon had a self publishing system that worked quite well. You still have one or two ebooks available now from that era. I is it something that you can make much revenue from at this point? Do people buy ebooks for learning how to how to code?
Jen Kramer:There are there are always a group of people who say that that's what they want. Unfortunately, I think those numbers are going down. I think what you'll find is in terms of books that it tends to be the older generation of people who want to learn from a book as opposed to a video, one. Two, I think you'll find that people who are more advanced in their knowledge would rather have a book so that they in other words, they can go right to the thing and look at it as opposed to I have this however long video where I have to, like, fast forward to find the thing. Right?
Jen Kramer:But but, increasingly, it's all about video.
Steve Burge:Okay. So there is a subset of people that will buy a tech book, but that's an increasingly Smaller. Small and diminishing. So from there, you moved to LinkedIn, which probably gave you a substantial increase in your audience too. Right?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Yeah. That was crazy. So I started with LinkedIn learning when I in 02/2008 when it was lynda.com. Yeah.
Steve Burge:You were an early Linda author. Right?
Jen Kramer:I was. I was. There were about 70 people that worked there. It was run by Linda Weinman. And what had happened was Joe LeBlanc had originally recorded a bunch of Joomla videos.
Jen Kramer:I didn't know Joe at the time. But somebody some one of my Marlboro students actually sent me a link and said, hey. Look. There's these new Joomla videos that are up on lynda.com. And I was like, wow.
Jen Kramer:I thought I thought she just did Adobe courses, which was mostly true at that point in time. Adobe and and Macromedia, Dreamweaver and stuff. So I took a look and right on the page with Joe's new course was this little button that said call for trainers. You know, you wanna teach for us? So I clicked the button and I filled out the form thinking like there's no way somebody's gonna get back to me.
Jen Kramer:They got back to me the next day and that was my first Joomla course with them. Then that was my onboarding to my whole LinkedIn thing. So I started off doing tons and tons of Joomla courses with them. And then like I've into HTML and CSS and no code tools and so forth. So yeah, I've recorded at this point, I think 80 odd courses with them.
Jen Kramer:Seriously? Over over that time. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Wow. It I knew you were prolific for them, but not not not quite that prolific.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Yeah. It's been a lot. It's been a lot of fun. In fact, I'm going there next week to record a new course.
Jen Kramer:So there you go.
Steve Burge:I was gonna ask that because I knew back in the day Yeah. Linda and maybe initially LinkedIn would fly you out to to California to sit down in an expensive recording studio and batch out the courses.
Jen Kramer:Yep. And they they still do, on occasion. Of course, the pandemic changed everything. So my favorite experience during the pandemic was I was asked to do the introduction to web design and development course, which is a really big course. It's foundational to everything.
Jen Kramer:And normally, I would have fly to California and been on a big sound stage. But it was a pandemic. We couldn't do that. So they actually shipped me boxes and boxes and boxes of of equipment and lights and cameras and lenses and computers and all the things. And in my dining room, I set all this stuff up.
Jen Kramer:I had them on Zoom and they would tell me what to do, like move the light here and move the light there. Like so I was as I said, I was both the gaffe and the talent. Moving all the stuff around, try trying to get this together for the course. So if you watch it, it's the introduction to web design and development and LinkedIn learning. That's my dining room.
Steve Burge:But we're far enough away from the pandemic now that they can take you back to California again.
Jen Kramer:Yes. Yes. Everybody's back in in person. Although it is it is much less. I I have a recording system here at my house, and for most of the courses I just record here from home.
Dan Knauss:Have you ever thought about teaching how to teach? It's largely this kind of meta conversation we're having. Hitting meta. And you kind of hinted that, you know, there are some things that are effective and some that aren't and things that make effective teachers and and, you know, others just clearly not. Would you mind sharing some of that secret the secret sauce or and you're Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Think you wanna pursue.
Steve Burge:What I learned from a hundred LinkedIn classes.
Jen Kramer:What I learned from a hundred. So if I had to boil it down to two things, one would be so called chunking. So what are the things we're gonna teach and what is the order in which we're going to teach them, right? So remember, we're gonna end by being able to do a thing. You need to define that thing in technical or detail, whatever the thing is.
Jen Kramer:Then you can work back to what is where are we starting from? Who is who is your target learner? What do they have? What do they need for background? If they don't have the background, where should you send them to get that background before they take your course?
Jen Kramer:Right? And then we're gonna chunk it in between. And the one of the things that that a lot of people are not doing right now on YouTube is that they're always like, hey. We're gonna build a thing. Come on.
Jen Kramer:Let's go. Let's do the thing. But they don't they don't give learners a chance to reflect on what they've done so far. So they present like, okay, here's 27 things in fifteen minutes. There's no time for me to absorb any of that.
Jen Kramer:Right? It would be better if you actually chunked it into like, okay, so let's do this much, and now let's reflect on it. Okay. So the the the chunk that I just did in the last five minutes does this, doesn't do that. Would be cool if we did this next.
Jen Kramer:So now you have a story that's building in your mind. Right? So now I'm ready to go. Okay. So I know it does these things.
Jen Kramer:It doesn't do these things. Let's add on. So here's how I take it to the next level, and then we can reflect again. Also, giving people practice. That's really important as well.
Steve Burge:So YouTube prioritizes a a very rapid quick fire form of learning that may not be ideal for most people?
Jen Kramer:I'm not sure I'd call it learning, but yes.
Steve Burge:Attempted learning.
Jen Kramer:It's more like coding is entertainment. Right? So let me put this thing together quickly, and you can see and this is why people, I think, are so attracted to this concept of teaching is because I can show how smart I am. And if you're coming from teaching from that perspective, I wanna demonstrate how smart I am, You will never be an effective teacher.
Steve Burge:It's a little bit like like Duolingo when it comes to learning a language. It's very it's entertaining. Mhmm. And it's fast, but perhaps not quite so effective as sitting down, taking a more structured, steady approach.
Jen Kramer:Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, how much do you wanna remember? This is one of the things that I'd I've often told people is like, so what should people remember about this two years from now?
Steve Burge:Do you have tools or does LinkedIn have tools that allow you to code in the browser?
Jen Kramer:I believe they do now have some kind of coding environment for coding inside of the browser. But to be honest, I have not used it. I use CodePen. Got
Dan Knauss:some interesting future there with WordPress playground. WordPress VIP has started to use it a little bit and some of their own new little LMS. I wouldn't be surprised to I think it's starting to emerge in some of the WordPress training. There's a local guy at the unit. I'm in Edmonton, Alberta, the University of Alberta, I think has some quite a lot of WordPress stuff going on still courses.
Dan Knauss:He's got code execution in video. I understand how this works. It sounds like a security nightmare in some ways, but you can actually execute code within a video that you're watching live or later on.
Steve Burge:Okay, now you have me intrigued then.
Dan Knauss:That's pretty fascinating. Yeah. I've shared it in post status Slack I think recently or some others, but we should It occurs to me we don't really have or I'm not tuned into an instructional educational pedagogical channel. I mean, there's WP campus. We have a significant community that's kind of focused on building solutions in WordPress for the academic world.
Dan Knauss:But actually the trainers and teachers and learning theory, all of that doesn't. A lot of us have those kind of backgrounds. I taught writing courses primarily for a long time. Does that exist or is that just sort of a missing thing? The how to, because this is such valuable information from all the experience you have.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Well, it it is it has occurred to me many times to put together, I don't know, video training, newsletters, something about, like, how people can become better instructors. And I keep going back to, oh, but but, really, who's gonna watch that?
Steve Burge:That's the the people just prefer to bang out the videos rather than take the time to learn how to make them better.
Jen Kramer:It's more of a cult of personality than effective education.
Steve Burge:So what what topics really get people's attention on LinkedIn? You've got more than enough statistics available now over 80 classes. Which are the ones that do well?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. So one of the classes that I really enjoyed putting together was h practical HTML for no coders.
Steve Burge:Okay.
Jen Kramer:So if you take a look at things like HTML and CSS, everything that's out there is oriented towards like you are a developer or you are going to become a professional web developer. Nothing is oriented towards I'm the digital marketing person and like sometimes my WordPress, I copy paste from Microsoft Word and it's a mess in WordPress and I can't get that thing, you know, in the editor. I'm trying to get that thing and I can't get the space out and they they need to know how to flip over to the HTML sign and just read a few things. Right? It's not every HTML tag.
Jen Kramer:They're never gonna write HTML from scratch. We don't need to talk about file management. We just need to know, like, within the context of a WordPress editor, what is that HTML? And like, oh, it starts with a p and it ends with a slash p. You know?
Jen Kramer:That's a paragraph. Right?
Dan Knauss:Or what's a skip link? Anchor links, things like that.
Jen Kramer:Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Steve Burge:Oh, so the note code tools are increasingly popular. I imagine for a LinkedIn audience, for the business audience, Airtable, Webflow, some of those no code tools are a big business for you?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Yeah. I I have I have one course. It's called no code solutions for webs websites and web apps. Okay.
Jen Kramer:And it is a survey course. I think the last time I did 31 different software packages. And so in seven minutes or less, here's the software package. Here's the kind of thing that it does. Here's a couple of screens for what it does.
Jen Kramer:Here's what they say it it can do. Here's how much it costs. If you wanna know more, here's where you can go to their website. You know, just sort of like rapid fire. So just like a that 30,000 foot view, like, what is the difference between Squarespace and Wix and Webflow and WordPress and WordPress.org.com?
Jen Kramer:Right? You know, let's let's look at all those things. And maybe if you watch that series of videos, maybe you could decide like, oh, well, wordpress.org is going give me a lot of functionality, but it seems kind of difficult. Maybe I'd really rather go. Maybe I don't care as much as how it looks that I can edit it quickly and easily.
Jen Kramer:Maybe I'd rather go in a different direction. Right? So that was sort of my goal for that series of of videos.
Steve Burge:So feel free to tell me this is privileged information, but you get a really popular LinkedIn course. I mean, we were talking before you have a Harvard course with, say, a 50 people in a session, a small university class with, say, 20 or 30 people. If you have a popular LinkedIn class, do they do they tell you how many people might watch a class like it? How how big does it get?
Jen Kramer:I I think it's I think you can actually see it on their website if you are in the LinkedIn environment. Give me just a second here, Steve. I'll I'll give you an answer to my most popular class here. Let's see. At least I can.
Jen Kramer:I can see it before. I'm pretty sure it's on the public interface. So if I go to introduction to websites here, Introduction to web design and development. This one, maybe it doesn't tell me anymore. Oh no, there it is.
Jen Kramer:This says 01/8637 people started learning my intro to web design and web development course and that 4,531 of them liked it.
Steve Burge:Okay. That okay. So we've we've gone from a 50 to I mean, probably YouTube style numbers of Yeah.
Jen Kramer:Over a hundred thousand here. And then and then, like, in front end masters, I've I have a introductory boot camp that's been free, and that's been up since 2018. And that's had hundreds of thousands of viewers as well.
Steve Burge:Okay. So we've been talking about LinkedIn, which is perhaps more orientated towards the no code area. Even though it's a professional network, that professional might include marketers or people who aren't looking to become professional developers. Whereas you also work with a company called Front End Masters, which is a lot more focused on training the potential pro developers. Mhmm.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. It's really focused on professional web developers who are looking to improve their skills to get to the next level. So in some cases, have beginners who want to get into junior development, but a lot of people who subscribe to front end masters are already junior developers who want to move on to be senior developers or who want to move on to the the levels beyond that. So the classes tend to be very advanced.
Steve Burge:Oh, so Front End Masters is I want to say I saw you do some in person classes occasionally for them. But is it now mostly a subscription online video site?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. So Front End Masters works a little bit different in that they always have me on-site to record. The you record in the in Minneapolis, Downtown Minneapolis. There is a classroom. They have as many as 15 people in there at a time, and sometimes they're streaming as well.
Jen Kramer:And then they take the workshop that is that you record, and then they'll edit it, and that becomes a course that then people can watch.
Steve Burge:On LinkedIn, you go there and you sit in a booth. Right. But front end masters, they actually have real human beings sat in front of you in a traditional style classroom, and they film that.
Jen Kramer:And ask questions. Yes. Interesting. Which is good. Yep.
Steve Burge:Yep. And so those topics go more in-depth to the pro material.
Jen Kramer:Right.
Steve Burge:And they also, by the sounds of it, are pretty popular too, hundreds of thousands of views.
Jen Kramer:Yes. Yes. Well, as I said, the boot camp was free, so that, of course, means that there are lots and lots of people that watch it. The the courses that are behind the paywall are don't get that many, but could still be popular.
Steve Burge:Isn't that more enjoyable for you to have someone who came up as a an in person teacher to actually stand in front of an audience and and have people to to bounce off and ask questions of as you're teaching. Yeah. Mean, I we've got a me and you have been in the training business before for quite some time, and a lot of the people who did the training videos for us would get just inside their own head. They'd start to feel crazy after hours and hours of just talking to themselves and hear their voice echoing around their brain. Right.
Steve Burge:Is it nice to have real live people in front of you to interact with?
Jen Kramer:Oh, it always is. I I try to anticipate questions. People will always still surprise you and have questions about things that looking at things in a way that you've never looked at them before. So so it is nice to have that classroom. But when I am recording for hours and hours and hours talking to myself in a in a windowless room, I always imagine myself standing in front of groups of people and trying to anticipate what the questions are from that audience at that point in time.
Jen Kramer:And people will tell me their feedback is, you know, you were really good at presenting that information. And as I was thinking of that question, that's the thing that you answered. So so it can be really helpful to have that visualization of that classroom and then trying to anticipate if there were actually people sitting in front of you, what were the questions that they are asking at this moment in time. If you focus on the fact you're in a windowless room, it's it's not nearly as fun.
Steve Burge:So even now after after twenty years, you're working with front end masters and teaching people CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. How did you end up getting involved in the Annie Cannon's organization?
Jen Kramer:Well, actually, it I was through Front End Masters. Front End Masters has has donated to Annie Cannon's for some time. Our students have free subscriptions to their plan, which is really great. And so I was aware of the name from that point in time. I started, think, gosh, maybe two years ago, I I had a meeting with them just to talk about, like, good practices for teaching, which was helpful to them.
Jen Kramer:And then this job opened up and I applied for it, and and they decided to to hire me into it. So that's how that came about. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would have ever heard of them because we are very small nonprofit in a very niche audience. So we are a little bit difficult to find.
Steve Burge:So you get people who maybe are in a shelter, who need a a new path in life. And do they come to you in person? Is this done in a particular physical location, or are you training them online again?
Jen Kramer:Everything is remote. And, originally, Annie Canons was based out of the Bay Area and served Bay Area Students. Yeah. Then the pandemic happened. And just like everything else, they rolled online.
Steve Burge:That phrase again. Yep. The pandemic changes things.
Jen Kramer:Pandemic changed a lot for education. And so now all of we we're able to serve more people across the country. So because of the fact that we do pay our students, they do have to all be US citizens just for legal purposes. But, our students are all over The United States and so are our staff.
Steve Burge:So if someone is in their position, they're starting almost from scratch. I presume most of the people you're training come in with little to no web knowledge.
Jen Kramer:Yes. Actually, less than little to no. They they some of them in fact, we had one person who came in and thought that coding meant medical coding. So they're not even certain what they're coming to school for in some cases. So, yeah, great.
Jen Kramer:Hopefully
Steve Burge:hopefully you let them down gently. Yeah.
Jen Kramer:Yep. Yep. No. This isn't anything medical. Although you could use it in a medical context.
Jen Kramer:It's not really medical focused. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Yeah.
Steve Burge:So you see statistics these days that it's increasingly difficult or unwelcoming to be a junior developer because the opportunities are increasingly few and far between. You sound as if you're finding that to be a little true when it comes to the people you're training, that opportunities are increasingly rare for young people these days.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. So AI is doing a number on the business right now. Right? So at at some level we have so I have a friend who teaches at Indiana University, a good friend of mine, talks about the pervasiveness of AI with her students and like how she cannot get them to give up AI and actually focus on learning the material for the sake of learning the material. They just wanna run
Steve Burge:everything This is in coding classes?
Jen Kramer:Yep. In coding classes. AI is a real problem. So so that's that's one thing. Right?
Jen Kramer:So what employers say is, well, why would I hire somebody who's just gonna go do stuff on AI anyway? I I don't need I don't need people for that. I could hire anybody to go run things through AI. Right? So but the fundamentally, even if AI is actually writing the code for you, you still have to know how to think about the problem.
Jen Kramer:Right? What is the thing that I'm trying to build? Where am I starting from? What are the steps to get there? And that is what a junior developer really absolutely needs to bring to the table is that is that way of thinking about the problem, the way of how do I chunk something up?
Jen Kramer:What do I need next? How do I know that AI did it right? All that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, AI is right now just a crutch. And we had a lot of discussions about this.
Jen Kramer:So even back in the Bootstrap days, what is Bootstrap? Is it is it a crutch or is it a productivity tool? Right? So Dreamweaver, same thing. Is it a crutch, or is it a productivity tool?
Jen Kramer:Does it just let me go faster for what I already know how to do, or is it I can't do this thing without it? And yeah.
Steve Burge:I'd say nearly all of our developers here at PublishPress use AI, but not to write code. They talk a lot about using it to generate ideas or or give them a prompt when they're stuck, but actually writing the code? No.
Jen Kramer:Right. Right.
Steve Burge:I hope at least they at least they've mentioned any we've talked about it quite a lot. They haven't they haven't admitted to using it to write chunks of code yet.
Jen Kramer:Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So so I think that's where we are is that this disconnect with junior developers thinking, well, I just I gotta get this assignment done, so let me just run it through AI, and then and then I'm on to the next thing with no understanding of what I just did.
Jen Kramer:And employers say, that's not who I need working for my company. How do we start how do we teach a junior developer to actually think about these problems? And then how do we market those people so the develop that companies know that they're getting somebody who actually knows what they're doing?
Steve Burge:Do you have a solution for that? You probably have fairly small classes with anticannons. We do. You might have the ability to say, okay. I need you to avoid AI in this case.
Steve Burge:Talk to me about this.
Jen Kramer:Right. And that's that's pretty much where we are. Yeah. Because we have adults. You know, 18 and 22 year olds always different.
Jen Kramer:Right? They they just, in many cases, just wanna go out and get their homework done so they'll go out and have fun. These are adults who know very well know why they're at Annie Canons, and they know exactly what they're going from, and they know where they're going to. So we tell our students not to use AI and that this is better for them. They trust us.
Steve Burge:They have a a seriousness of purpose that a lot of young kids in boot camps may not
Jen Kramer:That's right.
Steve Burge:We have a a staff member who kind of speaks to what you're talking about there that he was basically our star support rep for a good number of years and wanted to become a developer. And he could never get anywhere with YouTube videos and AI prompts and had to physically take time off work to go to a physical boot camp one on one with a teacher. No distractions. A face to face interaction. And that really kick started him in terms of understanding the basics and the concepts.
Steve Burge:He wasn't able to to have the crutch of AI and had much better training than he had been able to get on YouTube videos.
Jen Kramer:Right. Well, this this is the biggest benefit that working with an instructor brings you is that all the information that's out there are on the Internet. That's absolutely true. But what order should you be doing it in? So, you know, a long long story that I've told is if you could start by just looking at job descriptions, what do I need to learn?
Jen Kramer:Oh, I need to know and react. Great. I'm gonna go learn react. You start learning react and then you're, oh, wait. But wait.
Jen Kramer:There's some other things maybe I need to know before I'm ready to go there. Right? So one of the things that a really good program can offer is the curation of what should you do first and second and third. Also focusing on the eightytwenty rule. Right?
Jen Kramer:So there's lots of stuff out there in web development, but to be honest, like 20% of it is what you're gonna use every day and a good boot camp should focus on that 20% because the other 80% is all edge cases. So if we do our job where we teach people how to think about the problem and how to solve the problem and we're using the code that we're gonna probably use most of the time, then our students should be able to investigate those edge cases on their own and learn how to apply them on their own.
Steve Burge:So if people like the way you've been talking about this and want to either learn themselves or have someone who needs to learn the basics and become a junior web developer, is going to front end masters, like, the best example of your CSS, HTML, or JavaScript training available?
Jen Kramer:Yeah. Yeah. In fact, go to Front End Masters, front end masters dot com slash boot camp. You can sign up for the boot camp for free. I think it's just your email address, and you can watch all the videos.
Jen Kramer:You can watch me there. I also have a class called getting started with CSS, which is also free at Front End Masters. Again, no subscription required, probably an email sign up. And that will give you a really good sense of my teaching. If you would like to go register for either of those and and have a look.
Steve Burge:If you want to learn WordPress development, if you want to learn React, whatever you want to learn, you need to start with the basics.
Jen Kramer:Absolutely. Please start with the basics.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Those were good twenty years ago, and those will probably be good in twenty years in the future.
Jen Kramer:They are the the things that are changing. Although we continue to add HTML and CSS at its core, it remains the same, and it remains backwards compatible, which is an amazing thing.
Steve Burge:So final question for you, and this is something we ask everyone that comes on the podcast. Is there a publisher or perhaps a a teacher, someone that you follow whose work you really admire at the moment? Maybe if their newsletter drops in your inbox or a new video comes online. Who is someone whose work you you really have admiration for the moment?
Jen Kramer:I I have always been a fan of CSS Trex. And, of course, they are a WordPress. I believe they have a WordPress back end. Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Kramer:So so CSS Tricks has been a a go to resource for over a decade. And Front End Masters has also started a blog as well, which is also really good. Chris Coyer, who started CSS Tricks, is now working with Front End Masters on their blog. And so Oh, okay. Yeah.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. So that's a really good one to watch. Not a lot of people are are reading it just yet, but but that's where Chris Coyer is now. And and, of course, CSS Tricks got sold and but they're starting to publish. After a a period of time with no publishing, they're back to publishing again.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I've noticed that just in the last few weeks. Jeff Gramm has put out a few really good things, and everyone's looking at it all of a sudden again. So that's that's positive.
Jen Kramer:Yeah. It's a really important resource. I'm really glad it's back.
Steve Burge:I know DigitalOcean were looking to sell CSS tricks. They still own it?
Jen Kramer:As far as I know. I'm not I'm not involved with them in any way. But yeah.
Steve Burge:Also, if you miss Chris's posts on CSS Tricks, then Frontend Masters is the place to go, Neil.
Jen Kramer:Believe the name of the blog is The Boost.
Steve Burge:Okay. Nice.
Dan Knauss:I didn't know that.
Steve Burge:Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jen. I will drop in the show notes links to Chris's blog on Front End Masters plus Annie Cannon's. If anyone is interested in hiring developers hiring junior developers, then we have some good people for you.
Jen Kramer:Or make a donation. That
Steve Burge:too. And I wish you all the best with your your training work, Jen.
Jen Kramer:Thanks. Thanks, Steve. It's a great time
Dan Knauss:to
Jen Kramer:get out after all this time.