Design multi-session learning experiences — workshops, internal courses, conference tutorials, full courses — that produce measurable skill gain rather than satisfaction surveys; and architect at the curriculum level: dependency graphs, prerequisite contracts, checkpoint placement, honest time estimates. A workshop is an interactive system; a course is a stateful one. The workshop holds one session of state; the course is longitudinal — a concept referenced in week 4 must have been written in week 1 and retrieved in weeks 2-3 to still be live. Backward design at this scale is schema design: decide what your queries (assessments) must return, then design the tables (instruction) that can support them. Modules are services, prerequisites are call graphs, checkpoints are SLOs, time estimates are capacity planning — and the honest-estimates requirement is the same as in sprint planning: a curriculum that says "10 hours" and takes 30 doesn't get completed, it gets abandoned, and the learner blames themselves. Sandbagged estimates are a teaching ethics problem, not just a planning one.
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Curriculum design is harder than engineers think it is, and the evidence is the same everywhere: the first workshop every engineer builds is "ten blog posts in a row." Nobody reta…
A blog post teaches one thing. A workshop teaches a sequence. A course teaches a system. The cognitive scaffolding is fundamentally different at each scale, and most engineer-buil…
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Approach: Important
1. The 2-hour workshop, designed and run. Backward design it: one learning outcome (one sentence), the assessment that would prove it (one paragraph), the instruction sequence tha…
8 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.