Industry: Software Development

JetBrains products used: Space

Organization Size: 60

Country: United Kingdom

Instil

Instil is a software company that builds bespoke software products and provides training globally. They work with customers to develop customized software on their behalf and empower their teams.

“Since starting to offer virtual deliveries in April, we’ve effectively relaunched the training side of the business and are now busier than ever. Space has been a huge part of that success. It’s an umbrella that provides and integrates everything we need to deliver our products in a distributed manner.”

— Garth Gilmour, Head of Learning, Instil

About Instil

My name is Garth Gilmour, and I am Head of Learning at Instil. I am the senior trainer in the Instil Training Team and spend most of my time delivering intermediate and advanced level training to software developers. I also do a lot of organizing and speaking at conferences and meetups.

Instil is a software company that builds bespoke software products and provides training to software developers globally. We are lucky to work with some amazing customers, developing software on their behalf and empowering their teams.

As Head of Learning, I lead and grow the training business. I still deliver a lot of standard training and mentoring, but I also speak and teach at major conferences like GOTO and KotlinConf. I advocate for the technologies we use at Instil and recruit speakers for the events we curate, such as Bash and the Kotlin Belfast User Group.

What does your company do?

We do two things, create bespoke software and deliver developer training. Development accounts for the bulk of our business, but training is also an essential part of our offering. We develop projects and deliver training in Kotlin, TypeScript, Java, C#, and Python, and we are currently building on AWS, Azure, Spring, and Android. Plus of course, Web Apps using React and Angular.

How big is your company?

We are a team of 60+ software engineers, trainers, designers, and product managers, and we are growing.

When did you start?

I started in the industry in the late 90s. I was a software developer for 4–5 years before taking a training role as a temporary lateral move. That was over fifteen years ago. I started with a different (long departed) Irish training company, and then was freelance for a long time. But for the past 7 years, I have been Head of Learning at Instil.

What do you believe in as a company? What is your purpose?

We exist to help invent the future. Our goal is to deliver transformational products and learning experiences to every client. It’s something that we take very seriously.

We are passionate about building products that users love, and enabling our customers to do the same. We have a deep culture of engineering excellence, which is something we try to pass on in all our training.


Problems to solve

Why did you decide to try Space?

We were a sponsor and exhibitor at KotlinConf 2019, in addition to running a workshop on advanced Kotlin coding. So we were present for the official product announcement and were able to talk to some of the developers about what Space was and what it could offer us.

After KotlinConf 2019 the training team requested a Space instance. We became familiar with the basics by using it to manage and extend the sample applications we use in our courses. When the social distancing restrictions were introduced in March 2020, we needed a tool that would let us collaborate online with students as part of virtual deliveries, and Space was the obvious choice.


Space Experience

How do you use Space?

Thanks to our training partnership with JetBrains, we are able to set up a dedicated instance for each virtual delivery. This could be a coding course in TypeScript or Kotlin, or perhaps a workshop where we build a sample application using React, Spring Boot, Ktor, and so on. We then run the delivery as if it were a mini-project, taking advantage of all the features Space provides.

What features does your team love most?

We use blogs extensively for creating setup guides and ad-hoc summaries of problem areas. We encourage students to create their own repos, submit exercise solutions, and request reviews with us. But the integrated chat channels have proved most helpful.

We have two trainers on all fully subscribed deliveries. One is actively instructing whilst the other uses Chat channels to handle any individual difficulties that may arise, especially concerning setup and configuration. The most difficult aspect of virtual training is ensuring that no one falls behind, so it’s great to be able to close the circle and quickly address issues.

How does Space help your work?

Since we started offering virtual deliveries in April, we’ve effectively relaunched the training side of the business and are now busier than ever. Space has been a huge part of that success.

What has changed at work processes?

Besides what we’ve already covered, the automation possibilities in Space are starting to really help us optimize how we manage new deliveries. We can use the HTTP API to automatically populate Space instances with materials and create User Profiles. Going forward we’re hoping to use the ability to launch builds within Docker containers to increase the number of courses we can offer remotely.

If you could describe Space in one sentence, what would it be?

It’s an umbrella that provides and integrates everything we need to deliver our products in a distributed manner.

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