I’d thought do a bit of an update post on what I’m up to at work.

I’ve discovered that when you are doing training for a startup, you do *all* the training. So far I’ve done lots of instructional analysis and a bit of design. I’m working with some outside folks to get the initial courses actually written. I’m writing courses – so I’m also coming up to speed on Ceph and lots of other open source stuff I’ve never worked with before. Short list (haha) of stuff to learn besides Ceph is:

• libvirt is an open source tool manages platform virtualization. One really cool post that came out today that had a good focus on libvirt was from our friends at Hastexo – how to move VMs from block storage to Ceph Object Store (aka RADOS)
• KVM – Is a kernel virtual machine – it is built into the Linux kernel. I’m so glad to see Scott Lowe is blogging about this already – he has a really nice KVM > libvirt comparison (thanks Scott!). Actually one of the first comments on that post mentioned Ceph 🙂
• qemu – Stands for quick emulator
• OpenStack – Trying to come up to speed on the different version of OpenStack, all the different projects and code names….its really alot. If anyone has a cheat sheet shoot it my way please!
• CloudStack – Same as OpenStack 🙂

One of the courses I’m finalizing is an eLearning Object Storage primer. I’ve been blogging and working with object storage for a year and a half. I was pretty surprised there were no online learning materials about object storage that is not attached to a product. After trying to write one, I understand why one doesn’t exist (was tough!). Also should have an Intro to Ceph course out soon too.

The other thing I’m working on is internal technical onboarding – which has also started to include some organizational training. Right now we are moving at a million miles an hour. We’ve started to have weekly technical trainings. The purpose is to make sure all of us stay up to speed technically, but it’s also a chance to try out presentations we want to give externally. It gives the person presenting a chance to practice, everyone else understands what we’re saying externally and has a chance to suggest improvements to the presentation. The best thing – I’ve had so many suggestions of what people want to hear AND present that we’ve got a nice runway of topics now. We’re also capturing these sessions on video, pretty exciting!

We’ve also been having all-day on-boarding bootcamps, will have the second one next week. Everyone installs Ceph – its great.

I’m also doing all sorts of planning, figuring out LMS options so we can track and plan, working with vendors, reminding people that people learn by working and doing, making sure everything we do is focused on the learners.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it all!

But it’s also fun. I’m back to thinking about how to connect people to the information they need to do their jobs, which is my passion. I’m back to being technical on tech that is rounding the corner from cutting edge to maturity.

I think I’m going to follow Scott’s example and blog some of the stuff I’m coming up to speed on – that’s always been a great way for me to reflect and learn. So watch this space! 🙂