Wednesday January 16, 2008

More mentoring..

It has been a while since my last post and we are starting to make good progress now. I think it has been frustrating for both me and Andrew in that seemingly simple things seem to take too long but the admin nightmare is over now. Our first Tech Demo on ZFS is planned for the 29th February and I am getting someone from Sun to deliver it. This is not the expected situation but I think to get some of the key tech demos done before the academic year ends Andrew is going to need a hand. I have someone lined up to do Solaris containers and also Xvm .

Andrew should now be able to take some courses; I am going to suggest he does Solaris administration Intermediate on the web and then Advanced here at the campus. It will give us a chance to meet up again and for him to spend some time with my current batch of students. There are lots of other Tech Demos he plans to do on Java and the like. The main concern for me at the present is making sure we get a good number of people attending, I plan to do a poster campaign which I hope will attract some interest. At this time of the year students are taking exams so it is difficult to attract their attention as they will be doing lots of swatting - hence the delay in doing the first Demo.

We are also making progress on getting the SunRay technology visible to students and the university. Andrew's University use SunRay's but he is keen to see them adopted to a wider audience. So I have engaged several people in Sun to decide how we can place a specific Demo suite of SunRay's for students and the Computing Department to see.

For me the most interesting aspect of this whole program is how the relationship between me and Andrew is developing. I remember meeting him off the train and introducing him to the lab team and making our plans. I think that my actions of helping him and oiling the wheels is helping us both reach the common goal of a successful ambassador program at his University. Later this month we have a meeting of the UK mentors where I am sure we will see how the other ambassadors are doing.