 Okay. Check one, two. Hello. Good afternoon, stackers. All right. Awesome, guys. So y'all are here for the Kubernetes talk, right? No? Yeah. All right. If you're here for the Kubernetes talk, we'll be doing that one. Yeah, I was going to walk away like you do that later. Later. Good stuff. All right. Welcome to our talk on talent development. We'll start with some brief introductions. My name is Tony Campbell. I'm director of training and certification at Rackspace and currently dedicated right now to the OpenStack Innovation Center, OSIC, which we'll be talking about in this talk. Mike Fossil worked with this guy. I'm director of the OSIC site engineering in San Antonio, which we'll talk about in a bit. I'm from Intel. But before we go any deeper, now that we've introduced ourselves to you, we're kind of curious about who's in this room. We really want to know why did y'all show up here when there's so many other great talks. I just want to know what's wrong with y'all. Quick show of hands. How many of you are currently OpenStack developers? Nice. How many of you would consider yourselves learning and development professionals? So somewhere in your job, you have to train people. You have to write curriculum. Cool. All right. Good stuff. Any of you all from academia, so you work at university, professors, none of that? Cool. Who's heard of the OpenStack Innovation Center before the summit? Before the summit. This is just my own curiosity. Okay. Awesome. And this is just because Mike and I were joking about this. How many of you are in the OpenStack Innovation Center? Okay. Thank you, audience. There you go. So to the rest of y'all, we apologize. If they heckle us, just to solve and get fun. That's why they're here to heckle us. Good stuff. All right, let's roll. So first thing we want to do is we want to grok OSIC. We know everybody may not understand what OSIC is, what it's made up of. So we wanted to kind of start by talking through this. Around September of last year, our companies, Intel and Rackspace came together and created the OpenStack Innovation Center. It was launched. This is a picture from our ribbon cutting with our executives in a big old pair of scissors, opening up the Innovation Center, which is just south of here in San Antonio, Texas. The Innovation Center resides at the castle. The castle is Rackspace's headquarters, and the Innovation Center is in a section called the bookstore area. This is just outside the bookstore area. These are the Rackspace offices in San Antonio. That is a real slide there that goes from the second floor down to the first floor. Got to ride it. Got to ride it. We got a little Star Wars stove back there at the top, but this is the environment that the OpenStack Innovation Center operates in. And one of the things we're trying to build, one of the cultures that we're trying to build into OpenStack Innovation Center was a startup type of culture, a real innovative and engaging culture. So we figured that working in the castle is a great place to do that. So we welcomed our Intel partners in with us, and they sit side by side with us. And we're just one big happy family in this kind of crazy building. For those who don't know, Rackspace's headquarters are in a shopping mall, a former shopping mall down in San Antonio, 1.2 million square feet. When you walk in, you know it's a mall. It used to be a mall. The escalators, you can't quite see them in this view. Yeah, but there's escalators, elevators, all that good stuff. So, all right, what's that? You know we have food trucks. The food court, there is a food court. The other side of the sign says food court, but that's where we sit. Yeah. There's no food. So the food trucks are outside, but yeah. When I moved out here for, I started with an apartment, and I was telling my wife, I was like, wow, I work in a mall? I'm going to live in an apartment. Welcome back to college, I guess. Right? Good stuff. So this is what we're all about. And we're really going to focus on the training piece of this today, but there's three tenets. The first one, training or people, we really want to add to the footprint of OpenStack developers. So we're not just trying to find a bunch of extremely talented OpenStack developers that exist today. We're trying to pair them with people who are new to it and bring them into the community and spend the time to ramp them up and actually help increase that footprint. We'll talk a lot about that. Roadmap. So we're also going to have a significant amount of upstream contributions. So if you want to see our roadmap, osik.org, we'll show that to you later. Osik stands for OpenStack Innovation Center, if you're here to say that. Yeah, thank you. But within that roadmap, we're primarily looking at simplicity, manageability, scalability, reliability, and initially what that looks like for us is a lot of early operations, deployment, day two activities, and then a bunch of different projects, right? And we're just part of those projects. We're not trying to create our own new stuff. We're trying to make the OpenStack world better. And then cluster. So you may have heard of this cluster if you've seen our bounty for big ideas. If you've seen that at all, if you have two 1,000 node clusters, you are more than welcome to use them. As long as you meet the criteria, which is, hey, I want to use this for OpenStack. Hey, I'm going to write about what I do. Hey, I'm going to keep it open. But think of this as a cluster for the community to use to test on a very large scale. Something you may not be able to do at your company in your house, right? So that's that. And then accelerate enterprise adoption. Really, we're all about removing the barriers to enterprise adoption. We want to make OpenStack as easy as possible. I'm sure we all feel that same way. But that's our primary focus in OSIC. Cool. All right, so in this talk, we're going to let you into our dirty laundry and kind of what we discovered as we tried to do this. As Michael alluded to, last September, when we all got together, we had this audacious goal of bringing a bunch of brand-new software developers into the OpenStack community. So by the time we're done, we'll be in the hundreds. I think we're about halfway there now. But our goal is to take people who have maybe never heard of OpenStack, really smart people graduating from university or other software development jobs, and then our goal is to bring them into the community and help them learn OpenStack and become contributors. So usually when you do training, here's how things have worked historically. You get a bunch of people who are really smart. You jam them into a classroom as tight as you can. Then you take a really smart person and put them in front of the chalkboard. Explain everything to these students. Jam all they can into their minds. Then you tell them good luck and send them out into the world, right? We were guilty of that in the beginning. We started training sessions where people come hang with us for four days. We teach them everything we could teach them. And then we say, hey, nice knowing you. Good luck out there in the OpenStack community. I'll see you at the next summit. And students would get back to their desk and wouldn't necessarily remember what they learned in training or they forgot little pieces of it. So it was real tough to absorb all that information in a short amount of time. How many of you have ever been to an OpenStack training class with anybody, not Rackspace or anybody, Rackspace or anybody else? Good, good, good. How much of that did you retain after you left? Let's say more than 50%? Anybody? Whoa. All right, my instructors, y'all got that? Listen to that. Historically, it's what we do. We try to jam people's brains with all this information. And OpenStack is really complex. So to learn it in four days is really not realistic. So our approach when we started our training center was to try something a little bit different to see if we can get that information to stick. All right, so here is our original plan. Don't take pictures of this because it didn't necessarily work, but we want to show you our original plan so that we can be transparent about what we discovered. Our original plan had four tenets to it, which we're going to cover. Recruitment, so we have to find this talent. Training, we have to train them. There was a coaching or mentoring component, so we wanted to pair them with folks in the community and then on the job learning or training as well. So I'll talk about the recruitment for a minute. In order to find the right people, we needed the right mix, right? So we wanted to find existing Intel. I'm sorry, I said Intel. I don't know where that came from. I must work at Intel. Oh, it is Intel. So existing Intel software engineers who made me new to OpenStack, who want to be part of this and want to grow, and they have that skill set, right? But there's existing OpenStack talent. That's where I got that. But existing OpenStack talent with Intel, within Intel as well. And then the other side of the coin was recruit high potential university graduates. So we have hired a lot of recent college graduates. They have awesome degrees. Many of them come in with masters in computer science. And so they're very talented. They've done internships. They've potentially worked in other places. So that's been primarily our recruitment plan. And then so after Mike and his team found all this talent, they would basically send them down to San Antonio, Texas to hang out with me and my team for a while. And what we did is we ran monthly cohorts. So every month, the Intel crew was sending new recruits into the OpenStack Innovation Center. And they would send a mix of permanent OSIC developers and rotational developers. And then a lot of people come in from different countries, from Poland, from China, and then a lot of people from all over the United States. Many of them moved to San Antonio and are rapidly becoming Texans. See them back there? Yes. And then some came and spent a little bit of time with us for three or four weeks and then headed back home. So there was a mix between rotational and permanent. We used a three-week onboarding cohort process where they would come to us, they would be in the classroom solid for three weeks. Don't necessarily do what we did, but they were in there for three weeks and we would tell by the end of the three weeks that they started to kind of gloss over. So that's when we started to take notes about maybe this approach isn't going to work just the way we thought. We started by teaching them how to contribute to OpenStack. And we took a guess that this was kind of backwards, but here was our theory behind this. We wanted them to learn how to contribute from day one. So when we taught them more about each project in OpenStack, we found a bug or they saw something that they could fix. They would already know how to contribute. So before we taught them the projects of OpenStack, we taught them how to contribute. We can debate whether or not that's the right approach. I think we're going to test a couple of things going forward, but that's how we did it to begin. After they learned how to contribute, we followed that course by teaching them the essentials of OpenStack. You all know there's so many different projects in OpenStack. And just to kind of understand how they all work together and how they're connected, there's a foundation of understanding before you can really move forward. So after contributions, we taught them the essentials. Then we did a deep dive on Neutron because full disclosure, when people come to us and they're confused, are they lost in OpenStack, a lot of times it ties back into Neutron. So we took everyone on a deep dive to Neutron in order to get them comfortable with that technology. And then the other big thing for those of you in the learning and development community, we are really big on measuring the success of our programs. So we did two types of assessments. One was an NPS survey, and that's like the Kirkpatrick level one for all my L&D people out there. That's just to say, hey, what did you think about the course? Did you like it? Did you enjoy yourself? So we used an NPS ranking. I don't know if you all are familiar with NPSing by familiar with NPS. So that ranking is from negative 100 to positive 100 is the ranking on that score. Nines and 10s are what we call promoters. You want everyone to score a 9 or 10 on that scale. Any one thing below 6 is the detractor. So the tricky thing about this scale, somebody can give you a 6 and think they're telling you good job, but in the NPS ranking, that's the detractor. So that actually pulls from your score. 7 and 8s are neutral so they're thrown out. So if you don't get a bunch of 9s and 10s, your score can be around 0, right? On a negative 100 to a positive 100 score. So that's a really tough scoring mechanism, but we find that it really drives people who really are promoters of the program, which is what we're looking for. So on a negative 100 score, we also use technical assessments. So when the students came in, we gave them an exam on OpenStack knowing that they knew next to nothing about it. So we expected everyone to do pretty bad on that exam. Some folks surprised us and came in and knocked it out the park, but most people scored where we thought they would score. And then the idea is you give them that same exam after the training to see the delta. Make sense? Was this one mine? This one was mine too. Okay, so on top of the training program, one of the things that we have at our benefit down in San Antonio and in Rackspace in general is we have a lot of OpenStack talent. So what we were able to do is we were to bring some of those veteran OpenStack developers and we paired them with some of our new Intel graduates and cohorts and allowed those groups to work together. So when the students graduated, they were able to call on a mentor who would explain to them, oh, this is how you get that push through in the community or this is how you connect with the community and the code in this project. So those mentors were there to help kind of guide them through after the training. So each new team member was assigned to a small group of two to three and those were assigned with a mentor who worked with them on a weekly basis. We tried to get our coaches to meet regularly and we encouraged our coaches and our players to develop a rhythm where they can talk to each other and kind of build a rapport. So that was our original coaching plan. I think that's yours. We were finding training graduates to work on target OpenStack projects so what we were really looking for what were the core projects we cared about and how could we get them into a project surrounded by people, surrounded by coaches that could train them and help them on that specific project. And then we really started with bugs. If you're new to OpenStack and you're a new developer there, find a bug. Find an easy bug. Find something you can go through that whole process, get a couple plus twos and we'll show up at the summit for free, right? So that was one of the big goals was really starting there. And then... So what we did at the beginning was, and this was something that we learned later, right, was we had the Intel folks actually integrate with the existing Rackspace project teams. And that worked pretty well. We made some really good progress there and we've tried some other things since which we'll get to. Yeah, go for it. This one scares me so you do it. Well, we had some challenges and so go ahead, we'll talk about those. I'll just hit on these at the highest level and I'm sure based on the people that are in this room, number one, finding OpenStack talent. Very hard to find. And you couple that with trying to get them to move to San Antonio. Great place, by the way. Great basketball team. I can't believe I just said that. I'm not from San Antonio. But great basketball team. We'll just stay there. But getting people to San Antonio has been challenging as well. People seem to love Austin, by the way. Nobody wants to leave Austin. Teaching new contributors how to be effective in the community. This is very project specific. There isn't a, here's the formula now go into Neutron. Here's the formula, go into Nova. It's very project specific. And those teams, those projects kind of tend to have their ways of doing things, right? And so we reliant on those coaches for that, but throwing a newbie into a project wasn't always appreciated. We'll leave it at that. And then identifying the best bugs. Where do we start? We did start with bugs, like I mentioned. But what are the best bugs? Where's the right feature? What's the right thing to start on? Those were hard things to identify for the new folks. All right, so what you all are here for is, like, what did we learn, right? So we're going to take you all through our lessons so hopefully you can avoid the kind of pitfalls that we hit. The big ah-has that we kind of got through this whole process. There's five key lessons that we want to walk you all through in the rest of this presentation. Number one is cast a global net when recruiting. Number two is to farm the university level. Three is to leverage the solar system model. We'll explain that. Four is to develop a learning culture. And five is to ingrain the way of the stacker in each student. So cast a global net. We're in a global community, right? If you're a developer on OpenStack, you're talking to people all around the world, right? You know that based on the time of your meetings if you have meetings or meetups, right? But we did this as well on our recruiting as we brought people in. We have people from Poland. We have people from Mexico. We have people from France. We have people from... We did have some people from China for a period of time. What other country am I forgetting? I don't know. But then all over the United States as well. So we really cast a global net to find those folks. And we went well beyond our local area. Being... Yeah, our teams were... Thank you. Our teams were geographically distributed. So being able to bring them together into one building really helped. The problem with having folks all over the place, you don't really know each other other than IRC and things like that. So to fly people in for a certain amount of time to just kind of get to bond, to go to Topgolf together, to go to Topgolf. So that was a good bonding moment. All right? And then farming... I love that word, by the way. I'm not sure it's appropriate, but farming universities for talent. And so we're in San Antonio, which is not known as being a big tech hub. Rackspace is there, and Rackspace is doing a great job. But finding other computer science, computer engineering-type talent there has been challenging. We have an intern program, and we've actually, with Tony and his team, infused this training to these interns, actually paid internships, working on OpenStack, getting them familiar with OpenStack. Everybody comes out of this internship actually contributing to OpenStack. They do their own research, as well as do, I think, training once a week on Fridays. So what we're trying to do is have this cloud and OpenStack talent coming right out of college. We've hired several of those people. So... Yeah. All right, the solar system model. So here's what we discovered. I think a lot of companies out there who are fighting for OpenStack talent, their strategy is to go out and get the most experienced people they can and pay them whatever they ask. So we're kind of going out, everybody's chasing the same talent. So everybody's trying to get that top tier talent, and we're all competing for that same talent. What we kind of discovered is what we're calling the solar system model. We try to find one or two really good experts, just a few, and we'll consider them the sun. All right? Then we get a bunch of little planets which are new graduates from universities who are really smart, and we get them to hang around the sun. You following me? All right, I'm trademarking this, so don't steal it. Somebody blogs about this. I'm going to find you, I know you're in here. So the idea is you get a few experts and you get a lot of hungry people and get those hungry people to hang out with the experts and spend time with the experts, and it begins to kind of rub off on them. They're able to start to learn by just being around these folks. So that's what we've done down in San Antonio. We've got a few experts, and we're just hiring a ton of folks to kind of hang out with those experts, and it allows them to be guided in the community. It's really daunting to submit your first code submission that works, especially if your code submission isn't quite up to community standards. Depending on who you get, the response may not be what you're expecting. So to have a senior person there to kind of tell you, hey, look, it's okay. They're not dogging on you. They still want you to commit. They still want you to get this code in. You just need to change this. You just need to shorten your commit message or whatever it is. So having somebody there to kind of mentor you into what your code is in. So we're using and adopting this solar system model. Usually our experts are our PTLs, our former PTLs, our core developers on each of the projects. Yeah, and to extend your analogy a little further. If we're successful, we have multiple sons, right? I'm not sure how that works in the analogy. It seems like everybody'd burn up, but so you got to work on that part. I'm sorry. Galaxy, okay, let's go into the galaxy. Thank you. So we're also developing a learning culture. So this sounds funny. Mike kind of alluded to it. So full disclosure, we had a bunch of fresh graduates who are fresh out of training and they were ready to go. And we took those graduates and we deployed them with Rackspace development teams. And the response we got wasn't always a warm welcome. Sometimes they're like, oh, you're sending me somebody who's so green and I need somebody to do this deep thing, but they just got out of training to this complex code commit. So we have to go back and really build a learning culture and get these teams to realize that, look, the investment that you put in these graduates will pay off down the line, but you've got to be patient up front. So that's something that the teams have embraced. They've kind of clicked in on it. I think they're getting that message now. We also were really lucky to have training as a strategic part of the OpenStack Innovation Center from day one. A lot of people with training is afterthought. They don't think about it. It's not a part of the strategy. It's just something you do when you have to. But it was actually baked into this program, which I think led a lot to the success. We knew that we were going to train hundreds of new developers from day one. So having that built in really helped us. And then we're scheduling a regular rhythm of learning and development. So learning doesn't happen all at once, right? You learn a little, then you have to do a little, right? So we are trying to make sure that we infuse that learning throughout the entire process. And we're trying to go deeper and deeper and deeper. So we're going to talk with a real broad learning system. And now we have to go deep into each OpenStack project. Because as Mike alluded to earlier, just because you know NOVA doesn't mean you know anything about Neutron or Cinder or Swift. So being able to go deep on those projects is something that we're looking to next. And we're always going to continue to use learning assessments, right? So we always, it's not enough for people to walk out of the training and say, yeah, I enjoyed that. We want to be able to give them an exam, so that's a part of how we measure our effectiveness. And one thing I'll add to that, back to the recruiting that we showed earlier when I and actually some other people in the room have been helping me, talk to potentially new candidates and they're new to OpenStack, we're able to say, don't worry, your first day, you'll be in training and you've got three weeks of that and we're going to take you through that and you're going to know how to contribute by the end. That was very effective in recruiting. Some of those nerves, am I the right person? We've been able to get a lot out of employees from that perspective. So the way of the stacker. The other trick is OpenStack. OpenStack is a culture unto itself, right? So one of the things we have to teach new developers is how we do things in the OpenStack community. So it's one thing to be experienced as a Java developer and experience working in an academic setting. So I take a lot of CS classes, I do a lot of projects, that's one thing. But then when you get introduced to the OpenStack community, how do I get code into OpenStack? How do reviews work? What is a plus one and a plus two? What are all these crazy tools that they're using, right? We have to really begin to teach our graduates, here's how we do things in OpenStack. Here's how you become successful in OpenStack. And I know a lot of people who try to figure this out on their own, they often hit walls. They often get frustrated because they just don't know how the community works. One of the benefits we're able to do in the OpenStack Innovation Center is we're able to lower that barrier to entry and really showing them by our veterans, here's how you get things, here's how you are successful in the OpenStack community. Let's see. So, it's video time. So we didn't want to sit up here and blab all the time and kind of tell you what we've been doing. We wanted you to hear from some of our graduates and honestly I think that's why all our graduates are here, most of our graduates are here because they want to see themselves in the video. So we're going to show them their video. You can't leave now, Encore. If he's trying to leave before the video comes on. I think this is a pretty unique and challenging opportunity. It's not owned by someone, so how are you going to contribute to something that should be valid for everyone? Whatever we do is being washed and breathed by people around the globe. OpenStack training was good. It was a combination of technical and non-technical stuff. There's so many different aspects of OpenStack that the training really opened my eyes to all these projects and how they work and how they all work together. For me, it's learning about the cloud. It's not just learning about OpenStack but in general infrastructure and platform and what that means. It gives you a overall view of what is going on in OpenStack and what are the different services. It breaks it down into some very easy to manage sections so this is a friendlier introduction to OpenStack. The most important thing is that you need to have a strong set of skills. Technical skills are good but here you need more a combination of technical plus communication skills. High degree of collaboration in which you're working or the company or the team that you're working but across other organizations right around the globe. Actually guided me to think from a different perspective not from just enterprise and make it work. I think that's the biggest takeaway and something I did not have before coming here. So sometimes you are in a dilemma like you don't know what you don't know. So after training I know what I don't know and put those things that I don't know into the category that I know because I have help. The trainers were very good were always there. There's a couple of times when we went through and we hit something and I'm like this happens to me all the time now I know how to solve it. I liked the fact that your contributions are making an impact in the world. That collaboration proves to yield greater results in moving technology stack forward for the betterment of companies. I think that is what is different when you work with an open-source community versus in a closed environment. Then the question becomes how do we take that out into the broader communities to help other companies deploy successfully. We've also met several changes some of them were merged upstream others are waiting for reviews. Here anyone can come and join a student can come and contribute. It could be 3, 4 even one line of code it could be 100 and those lines of code are being used by many people and many companies in the world. It's kind of a revolution something that people are going to use. This is really a helping empower individuals and companies and being able to run their business efficiently and scale to change the cost. What is cool about this is that most people don't know the actual names or the actual phases changing the world but you know for sure that these people do appreciate your work to some extent changing the world and I'm part of that so that's what I'm loving. Real quick before we get out of here we just want to give you a sneak peek of what's next and hopefully we'll see how this stuff works out and we'll talk to you again in Barcelona and let you know what we've learned through this phase. A couple of things that we're looking at on the horizon one is talent replication so all of our graduates we're going to turn them into ad hoc professors so our goal is to get them to a point where they come back in and they start teaching what they've learned one of the best ways to learn anything so we're going to do that with our students. We're using a new learn-do model we talked about three weeks of consecutive training we're looking to break that up now we're going to break up the classes into smaller courses and then have them go out and actually do some work and then come back and do more training go do some work come back and do some more training so we're looking at a new learn-do model we're looking at project deep dives so now we're going to allow all of our Nova developers to go deep on Nova all our Neutron developers go deep on Neutron so we're developing courses that go down in the depths of each project so that folks can kind of specialize or major in those projects and we're also looking at adding classes around supporting technologies a lot of our graduates from universities are very experienced with Java for example but may not have worked that much with Python or may not have worked that much with Git so we are working on classes that allow them to understand all the supporting technologies that we use in OpenStack and then finally join us we really hope that you learn something that we already learned you don't have to go learn it the hard way and hopefully there's a lesson learned in there that's valuable to you Tony and I are available come chat with us we're here the rest of the week I know Tony's here all week people say that and then in the so you can find us in a couple different spots the Osik Dev Lounge that's on the fourth floor of the Hilton Austin if you haven't been over there come check us out plenty to look at maybe a little more fun environment a good place to be you can check that out as well second in Trinity it's right across from the convention center and then the cluster so this is just more of a OpenStack in general go use that cluster we really want the community to be able to use this to 1000 node clusters and really benefit from testing on that it's on osik.org really easy to find and then also on that site you can find the roadmap that we're planning for Newton and we'll be back I really don't want to leave the summit with kind of hearing a lukewarm yeah it looks like he has okay cool I'd rather hear wow you're way off or wow that's awesome if you guys can do that they'll be amazing and we can't wait for the community to all work on this together so looking for feedback on our roadmap as well yeah that's it so what questions do you guys have thank you all for hanging out hurry race hurry go who's gonna get there first winner I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about any non-technical training like soft skills training you did for folks who were coming in so we did not do a lot of that we did have one day onboarding and we did a culture training so we walk folks through culture and kind of how things work in osik and how our cultures are built we also have a strength based course that we use a lot and we put strengths into the into the training yet some of the soft skills came through in our contributing class where we talked about here's how you work in IRC or here's how you respond to reviews so those were kind of technical soft skills but soft skills are something that we hope to infuse as we go in going forward we were just like very technical biased beginning because the folks who were grading us were grading us on how many bugs we fixed were coming down the pike and we love to hear your thoughts on things you think open-stackers need to learn in that area well sorry I'm going to take two did you consider that reviews might be more welcomed approach than bug fixes in certain projects yeah we did we went back and forth on that and we were debating about whether or not a lot of our students felt they did not feel qualified to do a review I don't know what's the right way to do it so they were nervous about it so we decided to go with bugs but I think that's another good place to start thank you for your questions what you're doing is a real wonderful thing we have been facing shortage of skills for a while now I don't know if you are going to be set up to work with other companies suppose some company wants to put one batch of students on a three-week program can they approach you will you be able to do it for them if they bring some graduates they have recruited from somewhere yeah we would love to talk to you about that right now we're taking folks from Rackspace and Intel but once we get this thing where we feel like it's humming that is definitely a possibility so we want to talk to other companies in the community to figure out how we can help you all from what we've learned to onboard new developers so yeah please come talk to us in addition to doing this in San Antonio here do you have plans to take it globally to other countries, other locations specifically the OpenStack Innovation Center and then the training and the learning and extending that we've actually had people come in from China from Intel we've had people come in from Poland we've gone to Poland we've gone to California that was rough I'm from California I can say that sorry we've gone to California, we've gone to Poland we've got trips planned to China and Ireland where we're taking this training out there so that's definitely a possibility we're trying to balance the benefit of being in San Antonio with all those experts around you and then being somewhere where we phone our experts in but it's definitely a possibility to scale it so that is in our future I believe but right now we're going to get it right in the Alamo City other questions, yes you got you, beat you to it, you're good can you talk a little bit more about the technical assessment I assume that's quantitative yes, so our assessment we really have the benefit of having some folks on our team who actually wrote the very first OpenStack certification and they actually worked with the foundation on this certification that the foundation just launched so I've got a lot of great technical exam writers so they are actually writing there's two types of exams we have one is a multiple choice exam and that's one we give to the first set of graduates coming in where there's a bunch of great questions about OpenStack and they're just doing multiple choice test then in addition to that we have a technical performance based exam which we haven't unleashed on this group yet but it'll be coming in their future that's where we sit them in front of a live cluster and my evil instructors break it and then they have to go in and kind of fix it and figure out how to work around that so that's coming down the pike so it'll be a combination of both Cool, thank you Hey guys, I appreciate you putting this on so I'm working to build a global competency center as well in India with a couple hundred developers so my question is around you said you did a couple of assessments and based on those assessments have you already made adjustments to the different types of training or the assessments that you actually do or on the job training have you done made those changes already based on the feedback that you've gotten and if so what Yeah, so what we found is when we spot check each of the exams some students will struggle in areas where others are just able to really get it after the first load of training what we've done is we have students who are struggling in certain areas we've paired them one on one with our instructors where they've actually gone and studied with our instructors on those areas where they were weak so we didn't change the whole curriculum we did a very targeted tutoring session with those students and they were all able to pass after that time so we haven't found anything where we have to fundamentally change the training but we have had some spot checks that we've done for folks but I imagine as we go deeper in deeper level training we're going to learn a whole bunch that we have to change and modify Thank you guys I do something similar in Wipro where we're trying to find out how to develop talent and especially to make users to contributors because from a service integration company so we have mostly used to using a technology so maybe you give open stack we'll know how to deploy it but then not get into it and make changes to it so I was wondering you're talking about a three week course so after that how long does it take for somebody to become a I mean when do they actually start contributing? So that is a great question I think we've seen it across the entire spectrum so one of our success stories is we had an intern at UTSA who contributed after the first class so that was like wow amazing but then we had some folks that after they graduated it takes a while to actually get a patch through so it really swings I don't know Mike how long do you think it takes? I would say from the first three weeks to about two months in general everybody has done some level of a contribution is what I've seen I would say 80% of the people and an interesting thing is the way that we've started our training is actually as a contributor and so one of the things I noticed we didn't mention was we also want to get folks up to speed on Ops Dev Ops so how do you actually use it so if I can fix it am I actually fixing the right thing am I thinking from the right mindset so I think both of those pieces are very important so we're going to add that curriculum coming in May right? I do think the benefit too is trying to contribute without having any mentors around you is really a uphill battle I think our folks are able to contribute a little quicker because they have other Intel graduates and other RAC space mentors who are able to help them kind of navigate that process so and it does it depends on what bug you pick. Yeah I mean some of the initial contributions are this was misspelled right so they went through that whole process they got that cycle and then they get into more complex bugs and then they're doing feature work so those early ones are the simple things. I mean is there something like a part time or is that what you mentioned? So yeah so rotation we have some folks so there's some folks who have moved to San Antonio and they they live in San Antonio and work in the OpenStack Innovation Center until until we are no more I guess but then we have some folks that came in and spent time with us through the training for like three weeks or four weeks and then they went back to wherever they lived and they communicated with us through IRC remotely so they were extended members of our team just not located in San Antonio with us. That's not the developers right? Those are developers. Yeah so we bought developers in from from other areas, trained them a little bit and sent them back and then they communicated with the mentors over IRC and other digital means. Thank you. And to that point there wasn't really a mentor training right? Rackspace is full of very talented OpenStack developers that are in that PTO or CORE so they're generally those mentors we didn't really do that that just that was a nice benefit to partnership right? Yeah we had guys like Dolph Matthews were just grabbing people put them in a room and hanging out with them which was a great benefit. Other questions? Look if you all need to reach us we're both on IRC I'm at cloud train me. Mic 821. Alright so if you want to find us on IRC we'll be hanging out in the Intel Dev Lounge or at the Rackspace Cantina or if you want to find us on hashtag OSIC we'll be out there too so anywhere you want to reach we'd love to hear from you and see if we can help you in any way. Thanks for coming out. Appreciate it. Thanks guys.