Marcel Kornegoor - Course as Code: the future of AT Computing's training courses

Abstract

In 1985 Ger Austen (A) and Hendrik-Jan Thomassen (T) started AT Computing to share their knowledge of the UNIX operating system with the world through training. For nearly 35 years, the training formula has remained untouched: a classroom, a teacher, and an on-premises lab environment. However, the technology has evolved considerably since 1985 and the success formula of yesteryear began to show more and more cracks. A real breaking point came with the rise of Kubernetes. It turned out to be impossible to build a lab environment for a full class of students on the on-premises environment. Not much later, the COVID pandemic ensured that virtual and hybrid training became a necessity for survival and that the way people in general (and IT people in particular) learn was permanently changed. The big question is therefore how AT Computing will remain a relevant player in the market for open source training in the future?

During this presentation we show how AT Computing looks at this and how we approach both our lab environment and our course materials as code and git first in order to (hopefully) find a future-proof new formula. Through a demo with a plethora of open source tools (Terraform, Packer, Ansible, Docker, GitLab, reStructuredText, LibreOffice, Python, CI/CD pipeline and Google Cloud Platform) and a storyline showing the ups and downs , the attendees are taken on the journey of discovery that we have embarked on with Course as Code. We are far from our final destination, but we are convinced that there is hope.

Biography

Marcel earned a master’s degree from Utrecht School of the Arts and after spending a couple of years as lead editor of a technical magazine, he started his IT career back in 2011. In 2018 he joined AT Computing and was promoted to CTO in early 2019. From that moment on he started to adapt the course of AT Computing towards containers, config management and cloud, with Linux at the core (of course) and a way of working that is heavily influenced by DevOps, LEAN and Continuous Delivery principles. Being brainwashed by the AT Computing gurus for over 4 years, he has become a huge fan of open source software. In his spare time he likes to spend time with his family or on his road bike or mountainbike.

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