Last week, we launched Cockroach University with our first course, Getting Started with CockroachDB. Our goal in building this was to provide a way for people to learn CockroachDB in an engaging and structured environment with lots of opportunities for hands-on practice, as well as a chance to show off what they’ve done. We included a graded final exam, and those who pass will receive a Certificate of Completion.
In Getting Started with CockroachDB, students launch an insecure cluster on their computer, learn how CockroachDB distributes and replicates data among the nodes of the cluster, and find out about the basic guarantees CockroachDB provides, so that developers can build programs without worrying that their database will do something unexpected. It’s taught by myself and my colleague Lauren Hirata, who took some time off from writing technical documentation to script and record course lessons and write labs.
The course itself is made up of short videos, peppered with quizzes to check understanding and labs to practice newly-learned skills. The final exam at the end will determine if a student passes and receives the Certificate of Completion.
Should students wish to discuss anything they encounter, we’ve set up a Slack channel so they can chat with one another and our staff, with office hours twice a week when we’ll be available to answer questions.
I started as the founding Training Manager on the Education team a short six months ago, and am very proud to be releasing a course. It was a team effort, with a lot of help from other teams. The Training team is now growing, and Getting Started will be far from our last course. We’re already starting to plan a second course, this one more advanced, and focused on teaching Developers how to write applications backed by CockroachDB. We hope that soon, Cockroach University will be the go-to resource for anyone ready to start learning CockroachDB!
