Hi folks, I've been following along with the Mozilla / P2PU School of Webcraft / Mozilla Badge Lab / and related projects.
I think that this is a place where LOPSA members could do something about professionalization and informal certification-of-knowledge in the SA space. I'm tired of hearing about how we don't have it - and I'm ready to get some shit done about it. ;) Basically, Mozilla / P2PU is building infrastructure to let folks collect 'badges' for learning tasks or in accordance with their level of skill as web programmers. These can be things like: * soft skills / teamwork skills * good question answerer / helpful denizen of mailing list or forum thread * hard, quasi-definable skills (like having enough mastery to contribute to a particular open-source javascript project...) They're thinking about such things as multiple levels of badge, based on the rigor of the certification. These might range from self-certification that your HTML passes a validator, all the way up to potentially automated checks on things like accepted commits to a github project... They're looking for a partner group (or five, or ten, or whatever...) to help define how this stuff is going to work for the community of web learners; is anybody else on the list remotely interested in this sort of thing, enough to at least bat ideas about it back and forth with me? I imagine things like micro-certifications for different sorts of functional tasks - for example: * basic load-balancer technology (simple - knows how to configure a proxy section in either apache or nginx - up to complex - can set up X sort of load-balancer in haproxy or pound, and understands what X-HTTP headers do / how to configure them...) * basic OS knowledge -- e.g. particular kinds of command-line commando tricks, with simple exercises to accompany them. Scripting. * soft skills related to SA / operations work; I imagine some of this could be sourced out of Tom L's book. ;) Baby management skills, at least. * A sort of introductory familiarity with different sorts of common technology -- things like AMQP, RDBMS, generic SQL, packaging systems, blah de blah de blah. * Configuration management. Puppet / Chef / CFEngine / reconnoiter, devops tooling. Monitoring - nagios, zabbix, cacti, etc. In a more meta universe than the one that I think we live in right now, someone would write an application that lets an organization collect, sort, and schematize the ideas that they want to dream up certifications for. ;) And just mechanize the creation of useful badges based on interest and the skillsets of the folks who're willing to review suggestions. Like I said - any interest? I mentioned the idea to the badge-y folks at Mozilla, and they were tacitly interested in what our community of folks might think of..... best, --elijah wright (one of those Joyent folks...) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
