Making use of all those domains!

Mistakes are important.

If you’re doing something you know you can do, you’re not doing anything

Learning anything requires making mistakes. Make no mistakes and you’re not pushing yourself into new territories. Risk and reward are all part of the job BUT you can’t be reckless with a client’s assets or hard won google rankings.

Some sys-admin tasks need to be learned in a live environment, on a live server. Live domains and servers don’t come for free, so I propose recycling a little, to make use of the domains I’ve bought up, over the years, hoping to do something useful with.

All that’s needed to complete the toolkit is some hosting. Hosting (of the variety I need) doesn’t need to cost the earth and can be used again and again for practice, without breaking the bank. I could buy some and do some site setup/apache config practice on it, or I could use a local VM for free, either way, I’ll come back on here and write up what I learn from the experience.

Skillshare and Linux courses

I’m lucky enough to be working for a company that uses a video tutorial site that we’re encouraged to access. I’ve used video tutorial sites before and have often found them to be found wanting a little bit. Skillshare has quite a large number of courses and quite a variety of topics and teachers too. This makes for a smorgasboard of educational flavour and should be something to suit everybody.

I was after some hard core linux bootcamp training and found as an additional benefit, that the tutor’s voice was perfectly suited to pre-bedtime lectures. It’s not that he put me to sleep, more that he approached the topic with a calmness that let me absorb information without stress.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “blue light ruins your sleep patterns, dummy”. Well, you’d be right of course but since linux is all about the command line, I lost nothing by simply listening to the tutorials, instead of having to watch the screen as well.

The hour or so before going to sleep and after waking up in the morning are often dead time, to me. If the kids are awake and need help with their mornings, I’ll do that but I’m often left reaching for the headlines (which I’ve already read) or, sometimes, I’ll watch a video on YouTube coz I like to try to keep learning.

Skillshare has meant that I get to do something truly constructive with my downtime.

Comes with an app, all self contained and linked via your user account, so you can start watching on your phone and stop half way through a video and then pick up again on your browser at work, seamlessly. The app also chromecasts, which I thought was a very handy touch – especially if I want to put the tutorial on TV and work along with it on my laptop.

We’re sharing Skillshare at my place of work and I can see from the interest list, that we’re taking in subjects as diverse as video, programming, strategy and illustration.

I’ve used other video sites in the past, like Lynda and TeamTreehouse and of course, the peerless YouTube – do you have a favorite that I haven’t mentioned? Why is it better than others you’ve come across?