Hello, fellow server dweller!

I've got some great news - after more than a year of consideration, several months of gathering requirements, and many weeks of coding, I'm thrilled to present you with iximiuz Labs for Trainers, a shiny new capability on my indie learning-by-doing platform.

In case you were wondering why I haven't posted a single piece of content in more than two months, now you know 🙈

What's inside

The "trainer" use case is not new for iximiuz Labs. It's something that evolved naturally - people have started conducting workshops using iximiuz Labs' playgrounds since the platform's very early days. Some have reached out to ask for permission and ensure the required capacity, while others just "repurposed" the platform without even asking (but I wouldn't mind most of the time).

However, the UX wasn't there. The improvising instructor would have no control over the students' access to playgrounds or learning materials, and no visibility into their progress.

But not anymore!

As of today, anyone with a premium account can create Trainings and invite Students using the fully-fledged Instructor Dashboard UI.

A "training" abstraction serves two purposes:

• Organizational - Set up an event with a start and end date, a landing page, and manage enrollments.
• Educational - Build a structured curriculum by bundling related learning materials into a training program.

The educational part is optional - you can create a training without adding any materials if you only want to give students access to some playgrounds.

Anyone with a (free or premium) account on the platform can participate in trainings. To join, they simply need to click the "Join Training" button on the training front page.

Enrollment requests will appear in the Instructor Dashboard, and the training's author can either approve or decline them.

For enrolled students, trainers can track progress and manage their statuses by marking students as having completed the training or dropped out of it.

Last but not least, while it's completely optional, for the most optimal learning experience, the instructor can purchase Premium Seats and distribute them among students.

Premium Seats are needed to grant the good old iximiuz Labs Premium to training participants. This is always a good idea because it makes the playgrounds x2-4 bigger, removes the daily playtime limit, and also unlocks access to all the "official" premium materials (published by yours truly).

There are two types of Premium Seats at the moment:

• Limited-term - Ideal for one-time workshops or recurring training events with rotating student cohorts, where the primary value comes from the iximiuz Labs playgrounds and the training content.
• Lifetime - Best suited for long-term training programs or self-paced courses, where students may return to the platform over several months (or even years).

Limited-term seats are reusable - trainers can reassign them to new students after an event concludes. In contrast, lifetime seats can be assigned only once, and premium access cannot be revoked.

Who is it for

Based on what I've seen, heard, and participated in, the ideal customer profile for this product is individual instructors and smaller companies that offer a range of Linux, Kubernetes, and Docker trainings for small to mid-sized groups of students (5-50).

But also, it's a good fit for:

• Ad hoc internal workshops and webinars with no long-term commitment.
• University lecturers who want to take their programs to a totally different level.
• Self-paced courses on anything Cloud Native (sold via some other platform but hosted on iximiuz Labs).

And the great news is that I already have a few events of each kind lined up in the coming weeks and months!

What about Creators

In the previous newsletter, I announced a related "product" - iximiuz Labs for Creators. The release for trainers wouldn't have been possible without the extensive content authoring and access control functionality that was implemented to make the content authoring on iximiuz Labs available to the broadest possible audience.

And now we're getting the first fruits of it! I'm thrilled to introduce you to our two new debuting authors: Márk Sági-Kazár and Rory McCune. Here is what was published on iximiuz Labs since the release of the "for Creators" functionality:

• [tutorial] Containers are processes​
• [tutorial] Running Dagger Pipelines on GitHub Actions​
• [tutorial] Testing and Releasing Helm Charts with Dagger​
• [challenge] Dagger: Module Dependencies​
• [challenge] Dagger: Working with Secrets​

The quality of all these materials is so dope that I cannot recommend them enough!

And of course, more authors means more feature requests, so the Creator product kept evolving, too:

iximiuz Labs + Mermaid = ❤️

Tabbed Code Blocks 🔥

Both examples feature a training program, but the Mermaid diagrams and the tabbed blocks can, of course, be embedded in any kind of content, including tutorials, challenges, and courses.

Wrapping up

If you are a trainer who wants to forget about the pain of maintaining your own sandbox environments and getting every student on the same page with their local setup, or a university instructor who wants to deliver the best-in-class learning experience, give the new functionality a try. As for me, I'm eager to get back to the content work myself - it's been a while, and I'm excited to return to my Hands-On Docker roadmap.

Happy hacking!

Ivan