Learning with Lickability

Every Wednesday morning, we congregate on a Screen call for an hour—not to have a meeting that really could have been an email, but to learn. We call it Learn with Lickability.

Learn with Lickability is our weekly dedicated time for one of us to teach the rest of the team about something interesting, whether it’s related to iOS development or not. Sometimes it involves live demonstrations of fun things you can do with UIStackView, and sometimes it’s a detailed look into our process for finding and switching to a new business bank account. I once did a presentation about different methods of project management, and I’m planning an upcoming session about how to use Notion. Any topic is fair game. Here are a few of the topics we’ve covered recently:

• UIStackView / Auto Layout
• Practical Combine
• Swift Naming
• AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate
• Generics / Associated Types
• Property Wrappers
• SwiftLint
• Debugging

Why do we do it?

What’s the point of taking time out of everyone’s day for something like this? Sure, maybe that hour a week would be better used for something else. And maybe the time it takes to actually prepare for a talk is time that we “should” be using to build apps. So, why do we do it?

Learn with Lickability gives us structured time to expose ourselves to unfamiliar topics, learn new things, and practice teaching others. Because it’s completely optional to either attend or lead a session, we can be certain that the topics we’re covering are interesting and important to both the person teaching and the people learning—which means it’s well worth our time. A love for learning may not be one of the five flavors of Lickability, but it’s pretty close.

Learn with Lickability is also a great excuse to come together as a team for something a little more fun than the average standup or client meeting. With everyone working remotely, it’s hard to replicate the atmosphere of having casual chats in the office together, and there are less opportunities for us to feel like a team. Learn with Lickability, along with virtual game nights and team lunch Google Meet calls, is one of the ways we’ve been able to stay connected from afar.

How do we do it?

We schedule future Learn with Lickability topics a few weeks in advance so people have time to prepare their presentations on Lickability Fridays. On the morning of, we post that Wednesday’s topic in our #learn-with-lickability Slack channel, along with a link to the video chat.

We’ve been using Screen for Learn with Lickability because it’s great for screen sharing presentations or demos. The only downside is that we can’t add a link to the call in our weekly calendar event, but the Slack integration makes it easy to start or join a call right from the #learn-with-lickability channel.

Learning new things and teaching others should be an integral part of your work, even and especially if you’re working remotely. I look forward to Learn with Lickability every week, no matter what the topic is—because watcing a live demo or listening to someone explain something they find interesting is such a joy.

If you do something like this at your company—or if you want to start, which we highly recommend—let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you.