LAS VEGAS — Speaking April 5 at the Content Delivery & Security Association’s (CDSA) Summit at the NAB Show, Jeff Katzen, head of customer engineering for media and entertainment at Google Cloud, offered an inside look at gHack, Google’s open source project that enables experiential learning in a safe and structured environment.
The gHack project is what Google engineers likes to call a “20 percent” project where “engineers can say ‘OK, I’m going to devote 20 percent of my work time or my project time to do something outside of my core responsibilities in order to experiment, improve or innovate,” Katzen said. “What gHacks actually are [is asking] what problem does it solve, what is it the global impact it’s having, and how you can get involved.”
So when engineers at Google see an opportunity to explore a concept, the company gives them the free time to do so. Katzen sees Google’s way of doing things as a highly effective way of helping engineers learn new things.
“When it comes to learning, especially learning new technologies, there’s almost two extremes of how that is done,” Katzen said. “On the one side you’ve got a very unstructured learning capability like a hackathon action at the end. Hackathons are completely unstructured, require a huge amount of effort from the planning team. Hackathons are very effective, they’re a lot of fun, but they’re very complex and take a lot of time and effort.
“On the other side you’ve got classroom-style learning which is very, very structured and formal and not the most effective way of learning new technology in my opinion.”
gHacks finds a middle ground between those two, Katzen said, with the offering being comprised of a catalog of predefined, challenge-based, hands-on workshops.
To view the Google Cloud presentation, click here.
To view the slide deck, click here.
The CDSA Summit at NAB was presented by AMD with sponsorship by IP House, Vimeo, and EIDR.
