Edit: I still love the IBM Technical University. I am pretty sure the links at the end no longer work. I edited the first link.
Originally posted October 15, 2007 on AIXchange
A few weeks ago I mentioned the IBM System p, AIX and Linux Technical University held Oct. 1-5 in San Antonio, and recommended that you make every effort to attend. I did, and what follows are some of the reasons that I’m glad I went:
Sure, none of this had anything to do with AIX or Linux, but seeing these sites was well worth the time.
It’s easy to conclude that there’s no benefit to sending employees to these conferences for a week, that they’ll spend all their time as tourists rather than get the training they need. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Each day at the Technical University featured about 55 presentations, which were held in 11 different rooms throughout the San Antonio Convention Center. Some were repeats, so if two sessions you wanted to see were running at the same time, chances are at least one of them was repeated on a different day. So with a little planning, you could attend every session that would benefit you.
The 75-minute sessions ranged from lectures to discussions with AIX developers to hands-on labs and onsite certification testing. Presenters’ slides were available for download. This is valuable of course, but there’s still much to be gained from sitting with your peers and listening to the instructors elaborate on what they meant when they wrote their presentations.
Training tracks covered AIX, HACMP, storage, virtualization and other topics. Following the color codes made it easy to determine which presentations fit your interests. On Monday there were keynote sessions covering System p trends and directions, followed by an AIX trends and directions session. A typical day started with breakfast, followed by sessions at 8 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 1:45 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Daily printouts listed any last-minute itinerary changes.
Overall I found the content to be very worthwhile. Besides the content, it’s always nice to hear colleagues report issues that they’re seeing in their home environments and solutions they’d found. In general, it’s just good to spend time with others who work on the same systems that I do.
European readers may be interested in the System p, AIX and Linux Technical University scheduled for Nov. 5-8 in The Netherlands. Otherwise, there’s always next year’s Technical University. I’ll see you there.