Tag: course

Becoming a Better Programmer… Step One, Build a Course

Often a programmer sits back and reflects on, “how can I get better at my job?” A number of months ago I found myself sitting with that same reflection. One of the many ideas that popped into my head was to put together focused material around a topic. Training material, a blog series or something else. I wasn’t sure just yet what it would be, but I knew that was one of the many things I wanted to do. Fast forward a few months.

Fellow Tier 3 coder Richard Seroter, who I’d known for some time via his blog “Richard Seroter’s Architecture Musings” and I had a conversation about what we do, respectively, to keep our skills honed in tech. He brought up he’d be putting together material for Pluralsight for a while now and enjoyed that. It struck me as something I’d like to do too, considering my past reflection, so he made an intro. The rest is history!

Pluralsight Author, Achievement Reached

I’m now a Pluralsight Author (my author’s page) with my first course on Riak Fundamentals. I’m now working on a second course, on Docker Fundamentals. I’ve got a lot more in the queue after that too, so I hope to keep producing a lot of material on everything from the big languages these days like Javascript, Java, Ruby and C# to lesser knowns like Erlang, Go and maybe some others to boot.

For now, check out my Riak Fundamentals Course and some of the other great material that Pluralsight has available. They’ve just acquired TekPub, Peepcode and a number of other companies too, so when you subscribe you don’t just get all the Pluralsight material but also access to all the material at these excellent course creating companies! In the coming days and weeks I’ll have some reviews of other courses I enjoyed. As always, enjoy, subscribe to my blog, subscribe to Pluralsight and cheers!

References:

Getting Distributed – BOOM! The Top 3 Course Selections

A few months ago I posted a poll to ask what courses I should put together next. I just wrapped up and am putting the final edits and finishing touches on a Pluralsight Course on distributed databases, focusing on Riak. On the poll the top three courses, by a decent percentage of votes included the following:

  1. Node.js Distributed Systems – Bringing the Node.js Nodes together for Distributed Noes of Availability and Compute @ 12.14% of the vote.
    1. A Quick Intro to Node.js
    2. Introduction to Relevant Distributed Patterns
    3. How Does Node.js Fit Into the Distribution
    4. Working With Distributed Systems (AKA Avoiding a Big Ball of Mud)
    5. Build a Demo
  2. Distributed Systems Programming with Javascript @ 10.4% of the vote.
    1. Patterns for Distributed Programming
    2. …and I’m figuring the other sections out still for this one…  got ideas? It needs to encompass the client side as well as the non-client code side of things. So it’s sort of like the above course, but I’m focusing more on the periphery of what one deals with when dealing with developing on and around distributed systems as well as distributed systems themselves.
  3. Vagrant OS-X, Windows and Linux – how to build, manage and ship machines to use for development and recreation of production environments.
    1. Vagrant, What is it?
    2. OS-X, Linux and Windows
    3. Using Vagrant Machines
    4. Building Vagrant Dev Machines
    5. Vagrant the Universe!

Now I might flip this list, but either way they’re all going to be super cool. So stay tuned and I’ll be working up these into courses. So far here’s the sub-bullets above are the basics of the curriculum I intend to put forward. Am I missing anything? Would you like to see anything specifically? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to get everything as packed in there as possible!!