2021.07.20

People often say, “You know you know what you know if you can explain it to somebody else.” Last week, my team had a huge win doing exactly that.

When I first suggested the idea of presenting our Postman API testing methods in the bi-monthly demo, my team were a bit hesitant, a bit apprehensive. I was a little apprehensive too, not for them, for me. I could always use more practice at public speaking.

Such a reaction is perfectly understandable considering the audience is more than other Engineers. It’s Senior Engineers, Tech Leads, Directors, VPs, and even an odd Senior VP or two; an intimidating crowd of more than 50 people if your public speaking skills are new, rusty, or more comfortable in your native language.

Still, I wanted them to gain the confidence that comes from knowing that you know what you know because you have explained it to somebody else.

So I had an idea. You see, we work in media broadcasting, primarily radio and podcasting, so it seemed like a natural fit to format our presentation like a radio show.

By playing the part of a show host, I was there  to facilitate my team’s discussion, to ask them questions, allowing them to present their material without the distraction of keeping track of what comes next or fussing about with all the application switching in the screen share.

By the time the big day arrived, we were actually looking forward to presenting. We coordinated custom Zoom backgrounds from the studios of our own local radio stations. Shout out to Iris Hanson lurking behind me in mine from KGON FM. They talked me out of using a PlayStation wand as a microphone; definitely the right call. We had fun.

And they crushed it! They hit all their talking points without missing a beat; how API Schema Validation testing can prevent expensive errors and allow developers to work faster (suits love that), how the assertions work, how the various variables allow us to work smarter instead of harder, how we leverage popular and custom JavaScript libraries in our process, even how we use a second API for reporting the results. [Thank you Atlassian and SmartBear.]

 And now that it is over, and the feedback was fantastic, I think they know that they know what they know. And I have no reservations about going on holiday at the end of the month. My team have got this!