The week-long course is over. The last person left this morning. The first 3 days were brutal. We had to cover an assload of material and make sure everything worked on everybody's laptop. We'd explicitly told everybody which tools they would need, and in some cases, which versions.
Predictably, what we got was a hodgepodge of everything else. Wrong versions (either too old or too new) were a consistent problem. More insidious though were the language barriers. A few people didn't speak english as a first language, which meant that we had to do some one-on-ones to make sure they were understanding the intricacies of what we were saying. More than half (!!!) the people at the course were not java programmers. This is huge, considering that this was touted as a java workshop, with Real Live™ coding periods. That plan went out the window rather quickly, which caused us to need to shuffle the schedule on more than one occasion.
Still, all in all, it was good. The feedback and reviews they left us were quite glowing (apparently bossman said that this was some of the best feedback for a course ever). We were slavedriving them for a while, but we eased up at the end. Information overload and all…
