OpenHack the best learning experience
Tags: openhack, learning
Published: 2020-10-04 05:52:59


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I wanted to talk about OpenHack here. OpenHack is a great solution building exercise which involves collaboration, planning and hands-on. We may have attended many technology workshops. In conferences I prefer to attend more labs than sessions, because sessions are generally recorded so you can watch it later. But the hands-on labs are always live and then you must do it to experience. I would rather call it a muscle memory which stays longer if you try a technology out by your hand (doing practical).

OpenHack comes with both the flavors plus more. Let me briefly talk about how it works. Before the pandemic, OpenHack used to be always an in-person event. So, one need to travel to the location and then be there for three days with a team to attend. But with this COVID-19 it has become completely virtual. This gives us an opportunity to now attend more and more such events without really worrying about travel and expenses. Especially with international travels one need a lot of time and money in terms of planning and approval. With this, it is an opportunity, an opportunity to learn more in one of the best technology learning experiences.

If you’re planning to attend OpenHack, you need to register at https://openhack.microsoft.com/#events-calendar

In each event the seats are limited. It is not guaranteed that everybody who has registered will get a chance. One of the reasons is that the OpenHack organizing committee create teams of multiple people from different background and different companies. It is also a collaborative learning experience and each of these tables will have a coach who can guide you to build the right solution. The responsibility of a coach is not to tell you the solution but to help you if you divert too much while planning and building the application. For example, if there is an exercise which says that you need to deploy a Web App to a cloud, you can deploy that in many ways. But what is the right way for that challenge? Because some of the clues are already given in the challenge will tell you about it. Just in case you have misread the information and go in a completely different direction the coach of your table will tell you to come back and then rethink about your design decision. This is how you will complete a challenge after challenge and once you finish one challenge your coach will approve it based on the demo and the things you have decided and done and open the next one. Throughout these three days you will do this repeatable. You might not be able to complete all the challenges but you will get a fair idea about how you can build a real life solution by collaborating with others taking a design decision and implementing them just like you do in normal project delivery exercise. That is why I wanted to call it out explicitly, it is not just the hands-on lab, it is a way beyond hands-on lab and in most of the OpenHack there is no sessions delivered which means that you are not sitting idle and doing nothing and just listening to a presenter talking about a product feature for an hour. Even during the OpenHack if you would like to have some understanding about a technology area where you wanted to watch a video recording let’s say from a KubeConn or Ignite, you can plug on your headset and then watch it in the table personally or as a team. Earlier when there was a in-person OpenHack there used to be a monitor with every table where you can start the video, but it will generate a lot of noise. So, it was always recommended that you should listen it using your headset if you must listen any video to understand about how things can be implemented.

Long story short, in a nutshell if you care about spending time on learning I would recommend that you should watch the URL provided in this article and the look for anything happening in your time zone because the geography doesn’t matter. So for example if you are living in India both Indian time, Singapore time or European time matches your daytime. You do not have to stretch beyond the daytime, or you compromise on your sleep. You can even try out some of the United States based OpenHack challenges if you are a late-night person. It is up to you to pick and invest time on how you want to learn. This is highly recommended that you should look for it and enjoy the learning experience.