A week ago I decided to start a new journey. While I truly enjoyed working with Blake Mizerany and the team at backplane, I felt I really had a passion for training and growing the Go community and I decided I owe it to myself to pursue it.
Flashback: GopherCon 2016
I taught a one day workshop at GopherCon - Building HTTP APIs in Go - and I really enjoyed the experience. Putting together the class was a lot of fun, and I got a lot of very positive feedback from the people in the class. I've done corporate training in the past and I had forgotten how much fun it is. As the feedback from the class started coming in, it occured to me that this might be the solution to a problem I've had for three years now.
The Conference Organizer's Dilemma
Running a technical conference takes a tremendous toll on a person. It's at least a full-time job for the several months leading up to the conference. But for all three years I've been co-organizing GopherCon with Erik St. Martin I've had a full time job to pay the bills. We run GopherCon lean so the cost to attend is as low as possible -- that means it's never going to be something I can use to replace the income of a "day job". We've talked about it several times, and we're not interested in raising the prices to turn GopherCon into a profit-making enterprise. GopherCon is about the community, and even though attending a conference is never cheap we don't want to make the ticket price any higher than it has to be to pay the bills. The challenge for both of us has been to juggle full time jobs while organizing a conference and still having families that need our time and attention too.
The Solution
It didn't take me long to realize that I can't continue at this burnout rate. I love the Go community, and helping to foster its growth is one of the places in my life where I get the most satisfaction. The logical conclusion for me is to adjust my career to match the things in my life that are important. So today I'm announcing Brian Ketelsen 2.0. I've aligned my work life with the needs of my family, my abilities, and my passion for the Go community. I have a four pronged plan for paying the bills.
Consulting
I'm available for short term and project based consulting. Get in touch if you need some help with a stubborn project or just want to do some staff augmentation. Details are in the "Consulting" link in the menu above.
Online Training
I've started an online learning center where my first course is available to purchase. It's a deep dive into the amazing goa code generation framework for building APIs in Go. The course isn't complete yet, but if you buy it now you'll get a great discounted rate and you can follow along as new lessons are released. The goa class is the first of many. Some will be free, but most will be inexpensive like this first one. If you have ideas for topics you want me to cover, I'd love your feedback. I plan to cover topics including:
- Microservices
- Distributed Applications / Coordination (Go focused)
- Testing (Go focused)
- Containers and Orchestration (Kubernetes, Rancher, Docker)
I hope that these courses fill a gap in the learning materials available today. Most of the learning materials available aren't very specific and don't dive deep enough into a topic to be of much immediate value. These courses won't be generalized, but specific and detailed classes that you can put to use right away.
In Person Training
I've also partnered with O'Reilly to offer in-person training classes in Boston and San Francisco. You'll see more specific details with dates and registration information as soon as we've ironed out the schedules.
Corporate Training
Finally, I'm booking corporate training classes for teams that want to learn about Go, Distributed Computing, and Orchestration technologies. I've got several companies lined up already and I'm very excited to share my experience. If your team is looking to level-up on Go, Docker, or Kubernetes shoot me an email and get on the schedule!
2016 Availability
Here's my calendar for the next several months:
- August 17-21 - Speaking at Abstractions.io in Pittsburgh
- August 22-26 - Training Booked!
- August 29 - September 2 - Consulting Booked!
- September 5-9 - Training Booked!
- September 12-16 - Available for Training
- September 19-23 - Training Booked!
- September 26-30 - Training Booked!
- October 3-7 - O'Reilly in Boston
- October 24-28 - Training Booked!
- October 31 - November 4 - O'Reilly in San Francisco
- November 5 - November 30 - Available for Training
- December - Available for Training
You can stay informed about my upcoming classes, events, trainings and speaking engagements by signing up for my newsletter in the footer down below. Thank you to everyone who provided much-needed advice as I considered this transition. I hope you'll come along with me for the ride – I'm excited that I've finally found a solution to the Conference Organizer's Dilemma.
