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If you were to sneak-peek into AxonIQ’s internal chat, you’d quickly notice that the following comic from xkcd.com pops up once in a while in quite a few channels.
This comic is a constant reminder that no matter how many times we explain something, there will always be more people yet to learn about it. And that is a good thing. We are happy and grateful to have our lucky 10,000 (or whatever that number is worldwide) every day.
We strongly believe that the architectural concepts we favor bring enormous value to the software development process. The products we build make them not only accessible but also pleasant to work with for software architects and engineers. We know that because many customers, partners, and individual developers who once were among those lucky 10,000 are now our strongest allies and promoters. It’s been a fantastic journey for them and us too. We surely do not want to miss the joy of observing software developers discover new horizons, become more productive, and grow confidence in their skills. But it is naive to think we can scale out a process based on constantly answering the same questions in person.
Efficiently sharing knowledge and ideas is hardly a new or unique challenge. It is also a solved one. That is why schools and universities exist. So we followed the best practices and created our own:
We were unsure and perhaps a bit worried when we announced it to the world about a month ago. To our great pleasure, as it turned out, in this short period, we have already helped several hundreds of software professionals learn, explore, and become better at complex Event-Driven Microservices, Event Sourcing, Domain-Driven Design, and CQRS.
Of course, do not take our word for it. You are more than welcome to try AxonIQ Academy out yourself. Please let us know what you think if you do.
Announcing the AxonIQ Academy brought not only some relief and excitement but also quite a few questions. Here, I will try to answer the most frequently asked.
What is the real purpose of AxonIQ Academy?
Well, I believe I already answered that question.
The people behind AxonIQ products are software engineers with decades of experience in the field. We know it’s by far not enough to build something that like-minded people will fall in love with. It takes all the other people. Discovering the value it provides, accepting the constraints, and embracing the approach is a process. Sometimes, it requires a mind shift. It takes time. It comes with a learning curve.
We hope AxonIQ Academy will guide fellow software engineers through that process. We aim to provide complete knowledge from getting started to operate in production. Contrary to traditional courses, AxonIQ Academy gives developers flexibility regarding when and how they consume that knowledge. Of course, we’ll be there to help you, should you need us.
Is AxonIQ Academy just a fancy name for a collection of videos?
Of course, we recorded videos for each class. But we did so after carefully splitting the course contents into lessons. Each video has convenient bookmarks and a table of contents. Additionally, each class contains a written version of the content with examples you can reuse. We are now adding subtitles and transcripts.
Some people consider a series of videos (primarily published on YouTube or Vimeo) to be a free alternative to e-learning. We have quite a few YouTube videos too, but they have some disadvantages. You can not copy and re-use content from a video. The content is hard to index, and thus it’s difficult to search for specific words or phrases.
Most importantly, it’s hard to provide an end-to-end learning experience through videos alone. When designing the content for AxonIQ Academy, we took care to offer glossaries and summary pages after each lesson and quizzes that help memorize the content. We prepared exams (which you can take multiple times), and we issue course completion certificates. You can comment on any learning unit and discuss it with both other learners and AxonIQ staff.
How much will it cost?
At the time of writing this, AxonIQ Academy is FREE. More precisely speaking, there are only two courses available and both are FREE:
We have plans to add nine more courses to the Academy. Those will dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of Axon Framework and Axon Server. While not free, those courses will come at very affordable prices. It is not our intention to profit from selling courses. All income from the AxonIQ Academy will be invested back into making it even better for the next learners.
Who are the trainers?
On the home page of the AxonIQ Academy, we stated that you would get
"The knowledge we've been building up for over a decade"
We mean it. The two courses available so far are presented to you by:
- Allard Buijze - the founder and CTO at AxonIQ
- Steven van Beelen - the lead developer of Axon Framework
The trainer for each upcoming course will also be a software engineer from AxonIQ’s dev team. Each trainer is a practitioner who has experience in building the relevant software component and helping developers deliver solutions.
The content will always be an essential extract of the accumulated knowledge of our whole team of software developers who spend their days (and sometimes nights) working on the software and supporting AxonIQ customers around the globe.
Have you built AxonIQ Academy yourself?
That is a polite way to phrase “Do you eat your own dog food?” or “Do you drink your own champagne?” type of questions. And in this particular case, the answer is “No. We do not.”
We are pragmatic folks. We know what we are good at and what other people are better at — spending our time building an e-learning platform would be a waste. So we did our research and picked a service provider that specializes in e-learning platforms. If you have signed up for AxonIQ Academy, you probably have noticed the notification emails you receive come from their domain.
Why not use Udemy (or similar) instead?
We did consider that option. Many developers indeed are accustomed to some of the popular learning platforms and would prefer to study there. It was also tempting for us to some extent since such platforms have significant reach and huge course promotion potential.
The downsides come mainly from the fact that such platforms exist for the sole purpose of profit from courses. They serve trainers who are looking to profit from their content. They offer almost nothing to companies that would like to provide a guided learning experience.
So we considered the pros and cons and decided that it’s more important to have an accurate, complete, well-organized, and distraction-free learning experience. We want people to become Axon experts because it helps with the architectural and development challenges they have. Not because it happened to appear on the front page of a popular online service.
More questions?
About the Academy? Feel free to send them to academy@axoniq.io. We’ll be happy to answer.
About the architectural concepts or the products? You are more than welcome to start or join a discussion at https://discuss.axoniq.io/.
You can also reach out to the Developer Relations team via devrel@axoniq.io at any time and on any developer-related topic.
