When Training is Sick, the Asciidoctor is In

We are pleased to have our former President Tim Berglund present this month along with Cara Jo Miller.

5:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Food and Networking

Pizza and soda provided by Unison Systems.

Beer provided by PeerSource.

6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
When Training is Sick, the Asciidoctor is In: How we Opened up Curriculum at DataStax

Presented by Tim Berglund and Cara Jo Miller

Back in the day, corporate training curriculum was developed in PowerPoint or, if you were lucky, Keynote. This was a tried solution, but it wasn’t quite true—at least not true to the collaborative patterns that emerged as the web replaced the client-server technologies of a generation ago. At DataStax, the enormous demand we had for new curriculum forced us to fix that.

In this talk, we’ll describe how we migrated a training department from legacy delivery technologies to a more collaboration-friendly platform, using technologies like Asciidoctor, deck.js, svg.js, Gradle, and GitHub. We’ll share how we overcame technical obstacles like Git and GitHub skills gaps, how we trained people in the use of Asciidoc, what custom extensions we had to develop to provide the kind of development and curriculum delivery experience the organization had come to expect, and how the new platform made it easier for us to impose uniform design standards across a growing body of curriculum. We’ll cover important organizational and technical details, and equip you to consider such a transition in your own future.

Tim Berglund is a teacher, author, and technology leader with DataStax, where he serves as the Director of Training. He can frequently be found at speaking at conferences in the United States and all over the world. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to Mac OS X Productivity Tips to Distributed Systems, and is the author of Gradle Beyond the Basics. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs very occasionally at http://timberglund.com, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their youngest child.

Cara Jo Miller is the Senior UI/UX Designer for the Training Team at DataStax. She is also Co-founder of the Boulder/Denver chapter of Girl Develop It, an organization that exists to provide affordable and judgment-free opportunities for women interested in learning web and software development.
She is an artist & cyclist living in Denver, CO where she practices photography, calligraphy, graphic design, embroidery and knitting mittens for her two cats. Cara tweets at @cojorado (https://twitter.com/search?q=%40cojorado%20&src=typd&lang=en) and attempts to blog about design and biking at cojorado.com (http://cojorado.com/).