transitioned to training (and loving it)

I continue to have a blast working working at Hortonworks and enjoy growing my Hadoop & Big Data skills while working on interesting projects that can leverage the bleeding edge technology that supports these efforts.  I joined at the beginning of 2013 and have worked in our Professional Services (aka Consulting) team since then.  Again, it has been a blast!

One of the big reasons I joined Hortonworks over another comparable opportunity was that I thought I had a better chance to participate in training again.  Back at the "turn of the century" I had a chance to train Java developers and system administrators on the Epicentric portal platform (see... that was a long time ago as NOBODY talks about portals anymore!) which later got acquired by Vignette (now part of OpenText) - yep, another name from the past.  I also had a chance to build a bootcamp curriculum at HP for a next-gen app framework we were advocating at the time.  I got a chance to deliver it several times, including a fun trip to Galway, and then to scale it by running some TTT (train the trainer) sessions.  

Again, I love our consulting team, but I really wanted to find a role in the training organization and back in mid-August I finally got the chance!!  I've even got a fancy title out of the deal; I'm the "Manager, Training Platform & Content Engineering", but those close to me know that I'll answer to most anything. 

The new role is primarily focused on "content engineering".  That's a fancy name for curriculum development, but I actually have been able to join the team during a time when there was a strong demand on the trainers and I've mostly been out on the road teaching classes from our Hortonworks University offerings.  This has been great as it has let me see first hand what state our courses are currently in and allowed me to build up some ideas of my own (and hear from other instructors as well as students) as to what TNG offerings should look like.

Anywho, I've just been so busy getting my feet wet that I've had trouble finding time to blog.  I hope to correct that soon enough and to share some experiences from my new role.