Teaching DevOps to University Students

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Hi. I'm Emily Dunham. CS student at Oregon State University.

• FIRST team 847 captain, programmer, mechanical design
• OSU Robotics Club VP for ~2yrs
• OSU Linux Users Group VP then president
• TA and peer advisor for OSU EECS department
• ... and assorted other stuff.

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Been coding on and off since 2008, but didn't get into OSS till joining OSL in spring 2011 (recruited at Beaver BarCamp)

... I almost didn't get involved with OSS at all.

I thought I might want to sysadmin, interviewed and they made me a dev. Did that for a year including summer, interned at Intel the next summer, TAed for a while, came back to OSL as a sysadmin in December 2012.

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Founded in 2004, primarily student-driven There was a brief time when there were no full-timers at all. Thanks to support from wonderful humans including Shay Dakan and Curt Pedersen among many many others, we continued growing and hosting lots of projects. See osuosl.org for details...

OSL was originally part of network services and operated almost independently of the academic departments.

I happily sysadminned for that year and the next summer before some major transitions...

~20 students, 4 full-timers in 2014

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Due to some bureaucracy, the OSL got moved from network services to the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

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So I start hearing about how the goal is to reach a hundred students a year... this sounds pretty crazy, also awesome.

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Some time passes and it becomes obvious that no way will anyone have sufficient free time to make this happen. It's "somebody else's problem".

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So a few of us sysadmins start talking about how we could fix this.

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Portland State University does this neat Brain Dump program, which was originally for training new network admin students more efficiently...

• Clear, focused purpose (make PSU sysadmins), good win criterion
• ~10yrs old, well-established, grew organically out of mentorship
• infrastructure in place, real systems to administer
• The Deal

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There's kind of an online sysadmin training program called opsschool, great for self-teaching to fill in the gaps if you already know a bit...

• curriculum is very incomplete right now
• tends to be extremely old-school
• only really text -- few hands-on exercises w/ sufficient guidance

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Did you know that opsschool sends you cookies once you contribute enough? You should contribute.

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My boss used to teach a course in Linux systems administration. The problem... not offered ever, despite interest from students, because none of the fulltimers have time to teach it. The curriculum is licensed CC noncommercial sharealike :) http://osuosl.org/students/cs312

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Naming things is HARD.

Brought the partially-complete idea to boss, tentatively calling it mindmelt after braindump... argued about name until settling on his suggestion of DevOps Bootcamp. Buzzwordy but descriptive and not taken elsewhere.

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Centralized a site and wrote down mission, goals, audience, etc. Super important to do this early so everybody's on the same page -- it solves so many arguments before they start.

Using Sphinx (the readthedocs thing) but locally hosted because we have the infra, though RTD would've been ok too

Now it's time to start on curriculum...

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Have you ever tried to pull apart your knowledge of a subject with which you're intimately familiar? Saying to a newbie "let me just step back and begin at the beginning" then realizing you don't know where the "actual beginning" even is? Welcome to writing curriculum.

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Format of our meetings: 2 hours each thursday, roughly half and half development / ops topics

Screencast over Google Hangouts -- early feedback is that the videos help people not in Corvallis, plus makes it easier for students to catch up ("the deal")

Unifying the hardware -- should have a single boot USB that brings up EVERYTHING

• logged-in g+ account with hangout perms
• working VM
• all the slides
• able to talk to projector

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Time management is hard, keeping it hands-on is hard, balancing dev stuff and ops stuff is hard. Keeping it interesting and engaging is hard.

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The fix is self-awareness. Pay attention to what you're doing, how it's recieved. Constantly adapt based on subtle feedback. Analyze each meeting afterwards for how things worked, what went well, ideas of what to try next time. Don't be mean.

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Time management is hard for everybody. To help... * students: Have clear expectations and send appropriate reminder

emails

• Presenters: Communicate about when to remind of talk, schedule early to be flexible with their schedules
• yourself: Keep a calendar or list that you check regularly of deadlines, broken into the smallest pieces you find useful (big tasks are scary)

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We've done 10 lessons so far through the year. * Several hands-on review/catchup days * All students have VM running an app that they can hack on

• text editor
• git
• databases, networking, how servers boot, filesystems, configuration

• 1/2 to 2/3 have dropped since start, several new have joined through the year

  • Each lesson builds on the next, and student is better off in tech-related career for having been exposed to each set of concepts

• Earlier in the year it was clearer where to go / what to do, spent more time preparing... time goes VERY fast.

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Other results * good press * great resume thing * improved confidence and skills for speakers * better employment pipeline for osl -- we've actually seen these

kids' skills, how fast they learn, how hard they work

• continued interest from students, especially new students joining, is almost a problem

• Preparing to run it again next year

  • passing the torch, documenting everything

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What do YOU want out of this? Why are you here? What do you want to learn from me? What are you trying to build? How can I help you?