Others · 2018-05-15

Tupl leads Docker Workshop at University of Malaga

The Tupl team led a Docker Workshop for the Big Data Master ‘s program students at the University of Malaga. It was an amazing experience. We found a lot of talent hiding in those students!

A week before the workshop we went to the Ada-Byron UMA building to run some tests and check that everything was working as expected and found the facilities and IT infrastructure to be pretty impressive. We would like to thank the UMA Big Data Master’s program staff for their collaboration. They were very helpful and supportive of all our requests.

We started the session doing an informal introduction of our company, Tupl. What we do, how we do it, and how we apply Big Data and Machine Learning in our products. We could guess by their questions that the Master’s students understood us quite well.

Two of our current employees are former students of this same Master’s degree program. They were with us in this session, and after introducing the company, they talked about their experience joining Tupl and how they were able to apply what they learned in the Master’s program to their daily work. It was also interesting to show the students that the background of the Master’s program would allow them to access different positions within the industry as one of the former students is working in the infrastructure Field and the other is working in R&D. Students asked a few questions, mostly related to transitioning into a job in Big Data and Machine Learning. It seemed the students liked it a lot because they could identify with our employees.

Docker was a topic not covered in the Master’s program but it will broaden the student’s knowledge in a very practical way, so it was a good workshop topic. The attendance was optional and though most of the students are working on their Master’s, they made time to come to this workshop.

From the very start of the workshop, students payed close attention. The first part of the workshop was quite academic, laying down the concepts the rest of the session relied on. The second part was much more pragmatic, using examples and running commands on their machines. This appeared to be the part students enjoyed the most. They were running commands, checking the output and the behavior, and testing new ideas. Very interesting questions came from all of them. Apart from some clarifying questions, the rest of the questions acted as engaging feedback loop, allowing them to gain insight, comprehend Docker more in depth and, somehow, made it a more comfortable environment. We were all highly engaged with the learning experience.

After the workshop, we put two challenges to the students. One using Docker-compose and another one using Docker swarm, for those students willing to put in practice what they learned in the workshop. We received some solutions to the challenges with good and creative ideas. Kudos to the students! They did a great job solving the challenges.

We asked for some feedback after the workshop and learned that the students are eager to learn more. The general feedback was to do more sessions on Docker and more workshops like this one.

From my personal experience it was awesome. I learned a lot and really enjoyed seeing people so engaged and learning so quickly. I think events like this serve the mission of the company and helps Tupl become well known in the Malaga Big Data ecosystem.

We’ll do another Docker workshop for UMA students. Stay tuned!

Diego Rosado
diego.rosado@tupl.io