Wooo, I am getting into teaching!

A (slightly rambling) thread on why I'm doing this and why Homeschool by Senzo

1/x https://twitter.com/senzo_HQ/status/1323627997660876801

I always enjoyed mentoring and upskilling people.

The moment when something "clicks," and you can see that on a developer's face is priceless!
They got it! They understand and they went above that big weird hurdle! And it wasn't hard!

That excitement remains, and it's fuel...

That "oh, I can do this, I am awesome" excitement fuels people.

It fuels them to learn more, and more importantly, it fuels them to build new things!

Seeing what empowered people can do is a *huge* rush

Giving them a jump-start is all it takes!
Compound interest takes over

A spark can do wonders!

A disillusioned C++ dev that went on to become a fantastic Kubernetes dev.
A fearful QA that is now a world-class SRE.
A non-tech manager that learned high-level tech concepts and now drives enormous initiatives as CTO.

I was delighted to do that in my consulting work. I worked with small teams or small companies, but the impact was enormous.

I loved it!

Buuuuut I got bored. I am not perfect either, what can I say

I can only teach so many k8s classes before I lose my excitement.
I can only do so many repetitions of the same workshops before I become jaded.

I, too, have to push myself forward.

I also want to empower people that are overlooked. Unexpected gems.

Most of my engagements were in the EU, with a couple APAC sparkles. That's... privilege.

I am/was also expensive as fuck, so that further limited the student pool.

I am from Bucharest, Romania. Now, Eastern Europe is by no stretch an impoverished area. We're more than fine.

But finding mentors is hard. Finding someone to help with say, Kubernetes or AWS was and is a struggle.
I don't want the new, in-demand tech to be a SV-only opportunity

For the Kubernetes people, the Slack community did a lot to change this. It is global! You get access to a broader and larger community.

No matter where you are, you can now brainstorm and discuss your ideas!

@rdli probably doesn't remember this, but a while ago, I was trying to understand all the different Ingress implementations: nginx, ambassador, linkerd, kong, and traefik

I was so confused. There months in, and I made little progress. I just wasn't understanding the big picture.

@rdli was nice enough to take 15 minutes and explain it to me. IT ALL MADE SENSE. INSTANTLY!

I wasted 3 months trying to understand Ingresses because I did not have access to a community or easy training.

Thank heavens for the k8s Slack and the friendly people in there!

I don't want other people to go through the same things.

I liked upskilling people and teaching, but the way I was going at it wasn't good.

It was slow, repetitive, expensive, and very limited.
0/0 OKRs

I want broad access to opportunity, I want equity, and I want not to burn myself out.

And I am in a position where I can do something about it!

I'm a fancy AWS Container Hero, I am known-ish in the community, and I am good at this.

I considered writing a book or blog posts, or even a YouTube channel.

All the options were too static and would be quickly outdated. A huge amount of effort was needed.

I still want to do my consulting work, and I could not allocate the level of effort required.

The biggest blocker by far was the community aspect.

I wanted people to have access to humans and to be able to ask questions. To brainstorm. To lean on each other.

There's a reason schools and universities work on the concept of classes.

Enter Homeschool by Senzo, courtesy of @IamStan and @bestOfAllHans.

First of all, it's global. I get to reach every corner of the globe.

It's also a community. Classes are done in cohorts of 20-to-40 people. We get to create a small, safe community to learn in.

Lectures are pre-recorded videos, with exercises for homework. At the end of each week we get to do live Q&As on Zoom.

We chat on Discord during the week, and I can unblock people fast should any issues arise. Students also get to chat between them.

It's good for me as I get to teach without burning myself out.

I can record the videos on my own schedule. I can work and polish the homework until it's perfect

I have a Discord I can chat in, and I get to do face-to-face Q&A at the end of each module, at clearly defined times.

We'll see how it works out, but I am optimistic about it all!

See you there if you want to learn about running containers on AWS! https://homeschool.dev/class/containers-on-aws/