Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined by Adé Mochtar to discuss the IT learning platform, Instruqt and how they create and manage the platform with the help of Google Cloud. Sandeep of Google stops in with the info on the Instruqt arcade games we saw at Google Next ‘19.

Instruqt’s main philosophy is that people learn best by doing, and their courses encourage immersion right off the bat. Developers are asked coding questions and allowed to work in sandbox environments to fully expose them to the subject. Instruqt checks the student’s work as they continue through the program to ensure the material is being properly learned.

But learning should be fun, too! By putting developer challenges on old-style arcade machines, developers can test their coding skills, learn new things, and have fun at the same time. At conferences, this has been a great way to engage their target audience. Google Cloud games were run on the Instruqt platform at Next ‘19, and conference attendees came back day after day to try to get on the high score leaderboard. It was a super fun way to get people using Google Cloud technologies!

Adé Mochtar

Adé is Co-Founder and CTO of Instruqt, a hands-on learning platform for IT technology. Before starting Instruqt, he was an engineer and consultant in Cloud and DevOps-related topics. A big part of that job was to educate organizations on how to adopt new technology. With Instruqt, he tries to achieve the same but on a larger scale. His mission is to make learning DevOps and Cloud more effective and fun. At Instruqt, Adé mainly focuses on back-end and infrastructure engineering using Terraform, Go, and (probably too much) Bash.

Cool things of the week

• Step up your interviewing game with Byteboard blog
• Gartner names Google Cloud a leader in its IaaS Magic Quadrant blog
• Real-time bikeshare information in Google Maps rolls out to 24 cities blog
• Run Visual Studio Code in Cloud Shell blog

Interview

• Instruqt site
• Instruqt on Slack site
• Kubernetes site
• Cloud Functions site
• Hashi Corp site
• Instruqt Arcade at Next ‘19 video
• Google Developer Advocate - Sandeep Dinesh on Instruqt video
• Go site
• React site
• Terraform site
• GKE site
• Cloud SQL site
• Cloud Build site
• Firebase site

Question of the week

I want to be more familiar with Google Cloud, how do I navigate the space for material? Learn more with Qwiklabs and Coursera. Get Certified.

Where can you find us next?

Instruqt arcade games will be at GopherCon and Cloud Summits!

Jon will be speaking at Pax Dev and Pax West.

Mark will be hanging on the East Coast, then meeting with customers in Austin.

Sound Effect Attribution

• “Red Arrows Flyby.wav” by Figowitz of Freesound.org
• “crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org
• “Alien_Scream.wav” by Syna-Max of Freesound.org
• “Laser Gun7.wav” by Burkay of Freesound.org
• “Scratch2.mp3” by Feveran of Freesound.org
• “BumbleBeeShort.mp3” by CGEffex of Freesound.org
• “ComedyRimshot.wav” by XTRgamr of Freesound.org