Shirley
Shirley is a software engineer at Grafana Labs working on solutions to facilitate observability. She is passionate about test code, pair programming and believes in facilitating communication through listening, empathizing and clear and understandable explanations. Outside of work, she enjoys bike riding and knitting.
Intervention
Getting into DIY electronics and IoT projects seems easy—just grab a development board, follow a tutorial, and watch the LEDs blink. But reality is messier. Documentation is often incomplete, software libraries fall out of date, and troubleshooting hardware introduces layers of complexity that tutorials don’t always prepare you for. In this talk, I’ll share my experience learning to solder and work with DIY IoT, uncovering the frustrations of supposedly “beginner-friendly” projects—despite being a seasoned software engineer—and offering thoughts on how we should be talking to newcomers.
Along the way, I ran into outdated documentation, unresponsive project maintainers, the quirks of the Arduino IDE, and cryptic error messages. These challenges made me rethink how we approach tutorials, documentation, and the learning process itself. How do we balance encouragement with setting realistic expectations? Can we teach people not just to follow instructions, but to think like engineers?
This talk is for anyone who has struggled with a DIY project, fought with documentation, or wants to challenge the way we teach problem-solving.