Blogs

So this past summer a number of my Office Hours sessions had to be cancelled. All I really said at the time was that I was sorry about cancelling the sessions and that I was busy traveling.

And you should know, both of these statements were true.

But I didn't really explain why I was traveling...

So, here it is - Liferay is getting back in the Liferay Training business. Well, sort of...

This year we created a new course called Building Enterprise Websites with Liferay. Myself and many of my coworkers on the Enablement team were traveling the world or working behind the scenes to deliver the course to Liferay employees and to Liferay Partners... The immediate need was to get something out there, but to determine if that something had value, we targeted a controlled group of participants.

The feedback we got was extremely helpful and we used it to tune the content, the exercises, and our delivery of the materials...

Long story short, the Building Enterprise Websites with Liferay turned into a success! So much so that I'm betting there will be more to announce soon...

On a personal note, I had a great time traveling and delivering the courses, meeting new people and reacquainting with others that I hadn't seen in some time.

I also got to see a real football game with my good friend Andrew Jardine...

We shared this image with our team and of course they had some fun with it:

I also got to visit the Liferay office in Recife, Brazil (but boy, was that a harrowing travel story).

While there, I learned that I was kind of infamous and also had a nickname: O Gato Preto, or The Black Cat.

When Liferay adopted Slack for our internal communications tool, somehow my account picked up an old avatar I had on the web and just used it:

It's a picture of my first cat. It was just an avatar, so I didn't think anything of it really.

But to my friends and coworkers in Brazil, it really had a life of its own, and they would share stories of how O Gato Preto had answered a question they had or helped them in some way...

So I've been slowly embracing the O Gato Preto nickname, and in my blog banner images I've been starting to include black cats just for fun...

And, while I'm hoping to be able to deliver some new courses again in the future in person, at the moment my focus is on getting ready for

Hope to see you there!