 Ciao. Hey Dave, how are you doing? Welcome. Today I'm going to interview you. Right, yeah. Let me first introduce a little bit myself. I'm Luca, Italian, Chief Architect, Talos Digital, and Dave, tell us a little bit about you. I'm Dave. I do a bunch of different things, author of a notebook, the certifications, do consultancy, different things like that. And as you know, you and I have worked together on various projects at various times doing various things. Our lives, they were walking on the same path for some time. But I think it would be interesting to talk about the certification, we have been both involved, we are both strong believers, and maybe tell us a little bit the history around the certification, where it started and walk us through it. Yeah, so in 2016, we were in Austin, a bunch of people from different parts of the industry got together. The Linux Foundation sort of orchestrated that, put us in a room with a psychometrician, we all gave a couple of days to do it. And we came up with the themes, the topics, the domains, and the sort of tasks we would expect someone who is, you know, proficient with node, an intermediate to upper intermediate level to be able to do. From there, it was a fairly long road, stopping and starting in different things, but eventually we ended up in a place where we were able to release two node justifications. Oh, two certifications, that's kind of interesting, right? Maybe you can tell us something about the two certifications and how they differ and what kind of target audience we are. Well, the story behind it is interesting because we only set out to do one, but by the end of it, we had a five hour exam, which we felt was too long, especially since the exam is actually taken remotely using a desktop VM. So what we did was we had to pair down some of the questions, and it was still too long. And so we decided to split it up into two discrete pieces, one that focused on services and security, and the other that focused on general overall competence that would translate pretty much to any kind of node GS usage. So the first one is called the node services developer, and the second one is called the node application developer. Ideally, you want to be able to be qualified with both to show all around proficiency, but one is for your general competence. The other one is for specifically validating your ability to build services, which is often a thing that you need to do in startups and enterprises alike really. And if you think about the process, the certification tries to target a kind of broad spectrum of developers. So if you were to kind of suggest something for a more junior audience or a more kind of intermediate and senior audience, how do you see the progression of these two exams kind of following to these two buckets? Yeah, so it kind of depends on context as always. But if you're at a junior level and wanting to reach an upper intermediate level, or if you're at an intermediate level and wanting to validate that you're on your way to senior, in both cases, the general case would be to say, go for the application developer certification first, because that's your basis and your foundation, and then do the services developer really just to prove that those skills can sort of aggregate into a specific thing to do, which is build services. And also to show that you have a good grasp of service side security, things like that. So the other scenario might be that if you're under pressure to transition career or whatever it is, then you might want to take the services one first to show that on a practical level, you have those practical skills, and then kind of fill in the essentially the application developer is about filling in any knowledge gaps in your Node.js sort of programming abilities. Yeah, and that's a very interesting context, because if you look at usually how in enterprise developers are classified between quotes or they are identified within the organization, it's very interesting how the certifications tries to unify this common knowledge and common understanding of different kind of capabilities. And you know, you mentioned earlier on that part of your career has been spent in being author and a writer. And so it's kind of interesting to maybe get your perspective on what people can consume as some sort of material to get ready and get prepared and get onboarded into this certification. I mean, what would be your main recommendation for people that would love to start this journey of getting certified? Yeah, really amazing question. So there's several layers to this. The first one is you can go to the OpenJS website, and there's a thing called the tips document. And in there, there's resources, which include saying like the Node.js documentation, Node cookbook, the third edition, and a couple of other books are listed as well. I forget what they are. And that's part of it that you could do for something more official and structured. The Linux Foundation offer certification training, which is like on a self help self learning platform, which is for the currently for the Node application developer certification. The services developer certification is still in the works because I'm still working on it. So that should be out fairly soon as well within about a month and a half, I'd say. And those those for your sort of structured learning for if you if you're just looking to do it for yourself. For larger organizations that are looking to like use an initiative of training, I am working on putting together workshops that can be delivered remotely because of where we are. So any organizations that are looking to invest in skilling our people and verifying their skill levels with Node.js, you know, I guess, taught to me on Twitter. We're at the beginning of the road with this, but we're looking at doing something very interesting in terms of remote training delivery and in terms of the certification moving forward. It's it's very interesting, you know, because you mentioned the current global situation, right? And now where we are, especially how the tech industry is also adapting. And so the the all learning platforms that are adapting to this new moment in time. And I would love actually to get a little bit of your maybe in that perspective on where do you see these different channels to train people or, you know, to get either self trained or to be trained by, you know, yourself or, you know, different channels of training. Where do you see this going, especially if you start to contextualize on broader scopes like enterprise? Yeah. Yeah. So this is this is, you know, a huge area right now as well, because there is the travel capabilities just aren't there. But there's something about in person training that watching videos doesn't really meet. Because there's a lot of there's a lot that goes on when you're doing physical training. When I say physical training, I mean physical onsite training, not not not gym training. Because you the trainer, the trainer reads the room, and they can see who's struggling, they can see who's getting ahead. They can pair people together. There's all sorts of things that can happen when you're there. Not only that in the breaks on the lunch, you'll often have people with specific problems that are on the projects that they're working on, that that don't necessarily somehow tie in with what you're talking about. But they, you know, you can have contextualized conversations with them. So there's all these value ads that aren't really thought about. But you definitely feel a missing if you try to do just an online workshop, like just all video, for instance. Then you've got, you know, what are the options, like if you're not doing physical training? Well, you could do the self help thing, you could do the self learning on a platform. That's for us. That's that works for a certain type of person, someone who who gets along, like myself personally, I would probably do well with the self help model, but not everyone does. And also, it kind of depends where you are in your development, in terms of your skills and everything, as to whether you can actually do that. You might need some help to accelerate or filling knowledge gaps that self help can't really cater to everything for everyone, whereas a an experienced trainer can do that. And so, you know, as you know, you know, Luca, I've been thinking a lot about how would we do? How could we deliver training and get as many of the on site benefits as we had before, plus benefits of doing it online? For instance, being able to retain the recordings, you know, putting all of that together into a package that can be delivered. And I think, you know, that that in itself is a very valuable proposition. And we are working on a model for that and we are working on a model for that for enterprise. And to see how that can be that can sort of, you know, accelerate the capabilities of enterprise teams. Yeah. Sorry, I think you said something that you can be very interesting for everyone watching this, you know, fireside chat or as we call it our usual chit chat is, is the value proposition that the certification is bringing back to the enterprise, right? So there is a lot of value, not only from a knowledge and kind of know how and validations standpoint, but especially like you just touched the social aspect of this transformation, right? So the fact that, you know, we are kind of the whole kind of model that is now remote will enable actually organizations to also transform the way they think. And I think, you know, as you said, the certification is a great channel for this transformation, right? How do you see? It's key piece, I think. And like, you know, we need a, we need an optimization to validate, you know, the individual people's skills. That that's fair as well. That doesn't, that doesn't rely on, you know, heuristics like the fact, for instance, that that I have a British action, British accent, and I'm white, it gives me an advantage that shouldn't really be an advantage. We should be measuring based on whether people have those skills or don't, and whether they can attain those skills or not. And so, you know, in terms of enterprise efficiency and hiring methodologies and all of that kind of stuff, all of this ties in. But definitely it's very interesting on the enterprise side in this current scenario. And I know, you know, you yourself working for Tellus, you, if I can turn the question on the interviewer, you yourself have seen, I expect, significant adaptations as a result of this. Do you see, do you see a future where we stay adapted? Or do you see a future where eventually it all returns back? I think I see probably one of the biggest opportunities for transformation right now happening, especially in that all kind of social interaction, and people's kind of, I don't want to call it evaluation, but how to correctly measure against the requirements that the organization has. So if you think what I really love about the certification and I think is accelerating on one side, is the fact that there is no, every single candidate at the moment of the exam are all equal. There is no distinction, right? It's just a challenge between you and yourself. And that's what I really like about this certification is just that it comes across in a very democratic way in a very equal way. And on the other side, it brings back extreme value to enterprises because I think the content like you were describing is very aligned with where major organizations are going. And the other thing is that different organizations make different decisions in terms of technologies that they use. And even if an organization is using Node, they don't necessarily use the same framework. So we also were focused on the importance of having an exam for the certification that's agnostic to these criteria. So oftentimes, you know, certifications can have a bad reputation for being too subject-specific. What we do is we focus on the problem-solving aspects, not on specific patterns, or specific frameworks, or specific libraries, or just using Node Core or just using libraries. It's more about here's a problem, can you solve it, which is what it should be about. And it's what, again, I think enterprise would be looking for. 100%. And that's, I think, the greatest value of both certifications, right? And I would love actually to continue a little bit on this enterprise trend, because I think it's pretty interesting. And you kind of touched a little bit on the scope of the certification all year on, on the two different programs. You'd actually be very interesting to get your perspective on how you see the day-to-day working enterprise on large-scale organization be impacted on one side, and be kind of the driver for many developers to, you know, take the certification exam. So, sorry, say the question again. Oh, yeah. I meant, I would love to get your perspective on, on one side, how the organization can be positively, positively impacted by people taking the certification. On the other side, I would love to get your point of view on how you think that actually the normal day-to-day of enterprise that, you know, you know, or we have been together, you know, consulting for they, how can their kind of training on the job can, can help them being, getting certified? Right. Right. So the benefits of the organization and the benefits of the individual? Correct. So for the organization, as we've discussed, I think we have that capacity to measure. I think that that becomes an important thing in terms of, in terms of management layers within an organization. So if, if we, if we put training into that as well, when, when I go and do training for something that's not certified, which I, I often do, there's not necessarily an absolute measure on that, that the measure of whether the training was a success is based on the feedback and the feedback is based on a, you know, a relative feeling that enough of the candidates feel that they've been stretched and they feel that it's valuable. And that is, that is good. That is a good measure to a certain extent, but it's not an absolute measure. It's not, it's not something that you could really tap to a KPI. But if you have training that's attached to a examination that has a pass rate, and you are able to, with training within that organization, exceed that pass rate, then you know that you're developing people within your organization, a level that is above market conditions. So I think that that is a very powerful dynamic for, for growing talented teams in organizations. In terms of for the individual, you know, removing the, the fact that you, you have an accreditation that is supported and verified by the OpenJS Foundation and the Linux Foundation. You will also be skilling yourself up, even if you feel that you're at a certain level. What we found is a lot of people come to doing these exams and, and actually tell us, helped us with, with the alpha testing and this feedback we got where people did not realize how many knowledge gaps they had. Because in your everyday job, you don't necessarily come across as knowledge gaps. However, once you've knowledge, it still makes your day job easier, because you, you find easier routes to doing things because you've, you've covered more surface area in terms of the problem domain, right? So we, there's benefits all around. And I think something like this has a really compelling selling point to both people and organizations. It's, we've also got a lot of good feedback from alpha, beta, testimonials, different things like that, saying essentially that this was one of the best exams they've taken versus others, which is excellent. And a lot of the testimonials come back saying, I like how it focuses on real world problems, not, not just puzzles. So I think that putting it all together, you have something that can essentially elevate both the individual and the organization to be more successful with, with node. Yeah, I've exhausted that question, I feel. Yeah, no, definitely. And I think to your note, when we as a Telus digital agreed on, you know, contributing to this fantastic initiative, we immediately saw value in investing into that, right? And like you said, is a way not really to measure with a negative connotation our developers, but is a way to help them finding a path of growth and a path of improvement, especially because like I said, I compare the certification to like, you know, playing golf when you play against yourself, right? It's like, it's a competition. Once again, it's a healthy competition. And I think to add to your previous point about the physical training, right? There is there is some sort of element in the old process that resembles on, you know, people going to the gym or people trying to train and improve, you know, their capabilities. And I think that's the beauty of this process, right? Is that is a continuous iteration. And that's why it's pretty valuable. I would love to ask you a little bit, not really your point of view, but almost your point of view on workshop. And I said, I said it in this way, because as you said, it's part of what you are trying to formulate and something that you're working on. So I was more wondering if you could kind of elaborate a little bit more on how you see workshops and interactions. Now you what, in your honest opinion, is the best way for everyone to kind of bring that kind of experience within their organizations or their working groups or their communities? Yeah, okay. So I mean, you've got the self help in terms of a interactive experience. That's that could be one way that some people that have an affinity with that approach in an organization, they could they could use that approach. Then you've got services like you to me, which is, you know, pre recorded stuff. And that's fine, too. But it's, it's actually just another form of self learning, right? What I'm thinking of is guided learning, where you combine essentially videos and exercises and train a presence all into one, one package that's delivered to an organization to, you know, 20 people at a time to in an organization so that everyone gets personal attention. It's more of a master class than training, if that makes sense. It's more like a mentoring and coaching using, using training materials and using sort of a workshop approach, where with exercises and so forth. But that doesn't, that doesn't, that doesn't just leave you on your own in the dark to kind of battle battle through it. So that's the kind of formula that we're playing with currently. And, you know, hopefully, we'll have, we'll have more moving forward. But I mean, the material is there. The material is ready to go. It's more a case of finding something. And I think we're very close finding something that that is suitable for for enterprise organizations and even public offerings as well. There are there are different timelines that you could deliver this on, you could do it all in a week, you could do it over three months. But it just depends on on, you know, both the, the, the organization that wants that training, and the actual the actual trainer, which would be myself and possibly others that we'd get involved to do it, that are also similar sort of industry, industry experts. But whether we go forward on that, it kind of depends a lot on on a couple of different factors, whether there's interest, whether the model works, all of that kind of stuff. However, I think I am very excited about it. I think that it could be something that could really help push forward the whole digital transformation, that a lot of large organizations have been essentially forced to go into. So I think that that's a way of this worth going along for the ride with. Yeah. And we spoke a lot about enterprise and big organizations, right? So let's maybe take the last couple of minutes of this very beautiful chat with you to talk about communities, right? So because clearly know the it's a very popular framework and technology that are growing massively across communities and enterprise. But if on one side we saw the benefits of the certification for the enterprise ecosystem, how do you see the certification impacting the other side of the metal? That is the more kind of open community driven absolute origin of node. So we've all we've also seen global interest in the certification and from a community side, we have people that contribute to node who live all over the world, not just node, but also the ecosystem. This makes pricing a tricky issue. The certifications themselves are $300 each. But one of the ways in which to sort of access or allow access for the global community is the foundation of doing regular promotions. And there's a lot going on right now with scholarships as well. I think there was actually a post recently by the executive director and update on that. So in terms of growing individuals in the community who just are just go getters and they just want to get certified themselves. In terms of the actual benefits that something like this would bring to say the open source community, the more skilled people that we have and the more we can validate those skills, the better an open source project will do. So if anything, we want to be able to help people move into this industry because there's always the tech industry in general is always hungry for more talent. And as a byproduct of that, I would expect to see some more open source engagement as well. Lovely. So how can people contribute to that? Because that's probably the last missing piece of our conversation. Can people contribute to the certification? Is there is a way for them to be more engaged and be contributors? So for privacy, for purposes of having an exam that is difficult to cheat on, the involvement in the certification is not open, right? Because otherwise you could just go look up the answers. And that's the, it has been a community initiative for a while. At a certain point, it switched to a vendering arrangement instead. So in order to preserve that privacy, there's not really a way you can contribute to certification other than taking it and then report back, giving feedback testimonials and different things like that. However, what you can contribute to is the skilling up of other people for the certification. And if you're interested in doing that, definitely come contact me. So if you want to, if you want to talk, if anyone wants to talk about any of this other stuff we've been talking about, you can hit me on Twitter is at David Mark Clem. I think I'm going to be there typing away anyway, when this video is going out. So I'll type it at that point. And if you're interested in the certifications, go on the OpenJS website and you'll find it from there. Dave, I really thank you a lot for this chat. Oh, you want the last one, go for the last point, Dave. So the other thing was the Linux Foundation website, if you want to look up the self-help training for Node Application Developer. Again, I'll put it in the links. Lovely. Sorry, go ahead. That's fantastic. Dave, I really thank you for this beautiful chat. I hope everyone listening to this talk will find enough information for them to join this trend and try to get certified. And I want to say thank you again and ciao, Dave. Ciao.