Learn with Nic is now launched!

Colleagues & Friends,

LEARN WITH NIC IS FINALLY HERE!

I wanted to thank you for your support and following.

It has been quite the ride since I joined the DoD back in 2018.

I believe, together, we have made a significant dent and a real difference in ensuring our children have a chance at competing against China 20 years from now – but this is just the beginning.

Together, we created the largest DevSecOps implementation in the world, in the behemoth that is the Department of Defense, with 100,000 developers and about $60B of software funding. When I became the first Chief Software Officer in DoD, we demonstrated that a small group of people can get stuff done and have a real impact by deploying modern DevSecOps principles and open-source foundational technologies to the largest weapon systems on the planet.

That’s right, we’ve put Kubernetes and Istio, the foundation of our DevSecOps platform, on jets, bombers, space and even nuclear systems.

In one only year, we managed to save a 100-years of time across 27 DoD programs.

I would argue that we didn’t save 100 years, we just didn’t waste them! Russia, and more importantly China, aren’t waiting for us to figure this out.

I also know how difficult it is to keep up with the crazy pace of IT. Most of the technology we use in the DevSecOps platform in DoD is barely 3 to 5 years old, at best.

I used to give an hour a day to my people to catch up and keep up.

Now, I looked for unbiased training content that wasn’t pushing a specific cloud provider or Kubernetes distribution secret sauce. We wanted to be agnostic and abstracted to avoid vendor lock-in. We couldn’t find anything meaningful.

Worse, when it came to non-technical learning for managers and C-level executives, we found empty, buzzword-training videos that aren’t good enough. We want people to know why this is critical for any organization, so they have a chance to move at the pace of relevance and compete in a world that is mostly software defined.

Many say that Culture is more important than Technology when it comes to DevSecOps. I disagree. The reason why Culture is so hard is BECAUSE technology is HARD. So, understanding technology and STREAMLINING its learning and adoption will drastically reduce the culture barriers as well.

I truly believe that the future of education must drastically change. Self-learning is essential.

That's why I decided to create Learn with Nic. It is more than a learning platform. It is a community.

This course covers key culture principles such as How to balance cyber and innovation, How to enable your teams to focus on mission software, How to make sure you’re not building software in a vacuum, How to build an enterprise DevSecOps platform team, and How to fail fast, learn fast but don’t fail twice for the same reasons, all the way to technology key foundation topics such as What is Kubernetes”, “Service Mesh”, “Chaos Engineering”, “GitOps”, “Cattle vs Pet”, “Observability”, “SBOM” and tremendous case studies such as SpaceX vs F35 and the DoD-wide Enterprise DevSecOps initiative case study as well!

This course is really designed for everyone, but we’ve also created personas based on specific roles and professional goals so you will know exactly where to focus and how to get started.

Even technical people, who are a little bit behind when it comes to these new technologies, can use this course to rapidly catch up. As I said earlier, we will also provide curated deep technical content for a follow-up technical deep dive course.

This is just the beginning, we plan on doing deep technical, architecture and cyber dives!

We will update the curriculum once a year at a minimum, as well as release content weekly and have live Q&A sessions with our subscription members.

We want to bring real value here, not some useless certificate already outdated by the time you’re finished.

Continuous Self Learning. That is the future.

So, INVEST IN YOURSELF and let’s get started by learning about DevSecOps and what its benefits really are.

If you’re interested in being an early member of “Learn with Nic”, please go to https://www.learnwithnic.com now and subscribe!

As an early adopter, please use our 20% promo code: LETSBEATCHINA. This is limited to the first 1,000 subscribers and will go quickly.

If you are a U.S government employee (civilian or military), you get 50% off with the code: MILITARY

For enterprises and SMBs that want to purchase in bulk, we have discounts based on volumes so please reach out directly to me.

Hope to see you there!

Again, thank you so much for the continued support!

P.S.: we know the price isn't affordable for everyone, we hope companies will be able to help sponsor your subscription, so if you want us to reach out to them, please let me know directly but unfortunately, to update content every year and publish every week, it takes significant time and investments.