FeatherCast

There are lots of companies offering training for, and around, the Apache ecosystem, as well as many other topics that all create their own training material. Keeping this material up to date, especially in the fast-moving open-source world is not an easy task and takes a lot of time and effort. And all the time someone not too far away is probably working on a very similar slide-deck to explain what ZooKeeper does… It is this fundamental issue that the Apache Training project was created to address – centralising training resources and making them easier to access and (re-)use. We believe that training material, while important, is only part of what constitutes good training. The larger part is an experienced trainer who actually understands how the key aspects can be applied in real life and also the consequences of not implementing things correctly.nGreat training tends to come from the experiences and stories that a trainer can share in addition to the actual material. Based on this underlying belief and the very real pain of updating training material the Apache Training project was born. In early 2019, it entered Apache Incubator and is already building a community and gaining various contributions. In this talk, we want to share with you some of the events and the thought process that went into the creation of this project, as well as our main goals and principles. The first part of this talk will focus on how we arrived at the decision that open-source training material is a good thing to have and a little bit of the early history of this project. In the second part, we will discuss what the project is actually about. We will demonstrate the version-control friendly system of designing slides in source control that is at the core of this project. On top of these source files, we aim to create a metadata repository which will enable everybody to efficiently search available content and easily create tailored decks from existing material. And last but very much not least, we will cover how you can contribute to and benefit from this project, as this is front and center an effort from the community for the community!