Learn You Some Smarts for Great Good!

Like to code? Like to learn? Live in Portland? Well then you ought to join me in my great journey to the dark west hills of the lands of Hillsboro and Intel! I’ll be taking the following grand journey from Portland out to Intel to give a presentation on Pluralsight and teaching, learning, and getting smarts for great good! If you’d like to join me RSVP on the meetup invite here and let me know, I’m happy to transit out to the location with you.

Afterwards, as is standard operating procedure, we’ll have dinner, drinks, and food across the street at . Sure to have good conversation and laughs, as I always endeavor to do.

Ride Out With Me…

If you’re interested in riding out with me, join me at the Old Town China Town MAX Stop at 5:00pm. We’ll depart on the MAX Blue Line out to Hawthorn Farms Intel Campus. Afterwards, if interested I’ll be riding back too after the meet and post-meet meet at Morgy’s Pub & Grill (across the street).

What I’ll be Talking About

Pluralsight is one of the leading online educators of online, video-based, technical content in the world. In my presentation I’ll dive into how Pluralsight maintains integrity of its courses, insures learning, encourages quality, and helps keep the whole system moving forward in a seamless way. This presentation will be a small diversion from the technical components we often discuss as developers and instead a dive into the actual systems of learning, training, and production that are often on the edges of what we see as developers – but benefit greatly from when we want to learn something new! The core three things I’ll be covering include:

  • How video & doing helps us learn quickly.
  • How video is produced and the tools of this trade.
  • How to produce effective technical content to teach.
  • How to effectively use technical content to learn.

Once I finish the talk I’ll provide a wrap up here on the blog. My intention is to do more than merely post the slides, I’ll work to put something together that’s actually useful.

Speaking of Pluralsight

I’m also working on a new course right now! Ok, at this very moment I’m sipping a Black Forest Mocha at Coffee People while typing this blog entry while waiting for arrivals at the airport, but you know what I mean. I’ll have a basic outline and material for that course posted soon. For more on this pending course and other code event happenings, subscribe to the blog (scroll up and click the settings hexagon above) and or follow me on twitter @adron.

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!!