So finally doing trainings, started to pay out !!! I did my first paid workshop in Bangalore on 23rd and 24th Jan’16. In this first paid workshop I had 6 participants, all from different backgrounds and with skill-sets. I think this is a good start. I was able sell all the 40% discounted tickets of pre-registered users (free workshop) and early birds tickets. Selling the regular tickets as well would the goal for next time :).
To have the common setup for workshop I worked on Vagrant images, so that everyone can have same environment but running Vagrant on Windows has its own challenges. In the time of interest I quickly created VMs on the cloud and shared it with participants. There should be a better solution for this. Either I would have custom portable server or take the services from companies like Ravello Systems to setup virtual labs.
As mentioned in earlier posts I would be putting the content in open domain, so that anyone can access and contribute as well. Currently we are developing it would announce of wider consumption soon. Here is one of the feedback I got from one of participant industry veteran, Vishwanath Krisnamurthy
- Learned a lot which gives me confidence about this domain
- Hands on was good.
- Good communication and follow up
Some improvements
- The workshop website has some TBD’s which needs to be filled up
- The pre-requisites (Setting up google compute acct) if told before would have been great.
- More real life examples (May be take a a project throughout which addresses all areas) would have been great (Maybe a light weight one.
As mentioned, I would be working on first two improvements and should be able to resolve soon. Having a small project at the end of workshop would be great to connect all the dots. I’ll work on it and hopefully by next paid workshop I would create one;which is scheduled on 12th and 13th March in Bangalore. If there are vacant seats in the next workshop then I would be allowing participants from previous paid workshops to attend it for free.