I freaking love San Francisco. Seriously. It's pretty much the center of everything tech related. And if it's not in the city, then it's in Silicon Valley, just a short trip away (depending on what time you leave).

I also secretly love Twitter. Why? Because every single conference, meetup, or event I've wanted to attend has either been retweeted into my feed or has popped up as a suggested tweet / ad. Yeah, Twitter's algorithm is brilliant. Gotta hand it to them.

So what's any of this got to do with Nginx? Well the other day I tweeted about something I learned with Nginx and their location blocks. Not long after, when I was checking my feed, I saw a suggested ad/tweet thingy that said something about an Nginx User Summit and Training thing happening relatively soon and in SF. I clicked on it. Hold the phone. There's going to be a fundamentals of training course?! This is perfect! My coworker and I have been flailing our arms trying to learn and properly use Nginx for about a couple of weeks, and here there was a 1-day training being offered!

We spoke to the boss lady who immediately said yes and bought our tickets for us (early bird tix were about $145 incl silly service fees and taxes). We were off to training! Truth is, even if she didn't pay for it, I would have footed the bill because I saw that training to be crucial to my own success. Thankfully our boss is super awesome and encourages learning.

Success kid

Training Day

The Summit/Training was held at RocketSpace in downtown SF. The space was really nice, and we were given a bunch of different swag (tees, water bottles, cute lil cars with M&Ms in them, an O'Reilly book about microservices, etc). The best part was the fact that the tables were lined with paper and had crayons. :D Oh yeah the 12-yr-old me was stoked!

Training started promptly at 9:30 and went over the basics of how to install and configure Nginx. We were all given AWS EC2 or Digital Ocean droplets to work with. My coworker and I lucked out with DO boxes (who needs some long URL to type in for ssh'ing? Just give me a freaking IP!)

The pace was pretty good (admittedly a bit slow for my tastes) and was very comprehensive. It went over what each of the major blocks/contents and common directives were, how to set up SSL, how to set up multiple apps, load balancing, and how to act like a proxy server. All the things I needed to really learn were covered. Between each section was a 5-10min break for people to attempt the 'exercise', which was stepped thru by the instructor prior, so it wasn't anything extremely complicated.

I only really recall 2-3 Nginx folks walking around to check to see if anyone needed extra assistance, tho there were about 10-12 Nginx folks overall. The guys sitting across from us needed some assistance because their boxes didn't have port 8080 open (or listening, rather), which couldn't be resolved for whatever reason, even with a couple of Nginx folks helping out.

The final exercise was more complicated and right up my alley - a task to set up Nginx as backend and proxy servers, incorporating things we've already learned as well as proxy caching. The answers are apparently going to be emailed to us later so I'll check against that once we receive it.

Once training was over, the lightning talks began. Admittedly, this was where my interest wained, tho the guy talking about load testing with a thing called Bees with Machine Guns was really cool. My coworker and I opted not to stay until the end for the social hour and excused ourselves.

Overall thoughts

Seriously, this training was kind of amazingly perfect timing for my coworker and myself. Would I recommend it? Hellz yes! It's the perfect beginner course to anyone getting to know and understand Nginx. It's really simple to use, now that I understand it better. It was also validating to know that the things we were teaching ourselves by fiddling around with the servers were all correct.

I'm always game on attending training of any sort. Really glad I was able to go to this particular one. I hope to attend more and different training courses.

Level up +1. Attending the training and learning something is +10 life exp!

Questions? Comments? Hit me up at risaonrails !