Growing up, Gabe Ruttner was incredibly curious. He’d go into his family’s small business and find ways to improve things with technology. In one case, he replaced their paper-based serial number system by writing a solution with PHP and SQL.
Today, that curiosity is what drives Gabe as a professional. He’s the co-founder and chief technology officer of an early stage startup called Feather Docs, as well as an instructor for Udacity. As an instructor, Gabe has found a unique way to satisfy both his creative drive and natural curiosity.
“Teaching at Udacity is technically interesting in a creative way,” says Gabe. “I’ve taught four courses with Udacity, and curiosity has driven all of the courses that I’ve built.”
“For example, on my first course, Become a Cloud Developer, I had experience deploying cloud systems, so I wanted to focus and hone my expertise in security on the full-stack. So I taught the IM access management side of software development. That was definitely curiosity driven.”
Why Become a Udacity Instructor?
From Gabe’s perspective, being a Udacity instructor has added immense value to his professional and personal life.
“If I were speaking to someone who’s never taught before, I’d say it’s an extremely valuable and insightful process. Not only do you learn about the level of knowledge that you have, but being able to share that and improve someone else’s life is just tremendously amazing.”
To date, Gabe has been an instructor for the Become a UX Designer, Become a Cloud Developer, and Full Stack Web Developer Nanodegrees. He’ll also be an instructor for the upcoming Intermediate Python Nanodegree.
Beyond the impact he’s made on his students, he cites the process of building something that provides skills and education on a large-scale as being interesting and rewarding.
As Gabe explains, “Traditionally, this type of education has been hard to scale. We’re turning it into something scalable where hundreds or multiple hundreds of students are learning through the platform. It’s a really interesting process to go from something that you think you know, to something that you know well enough to teach, to something that you’re able to share with the world. And I really, really appreciate that.”
Quality is Number One
As a professional, Gabe puts a high value on ensuring everything he creates as an instructor is top notch.
“Udacity’s content managers play a key role in supporting instructors,” as Gabe shares. “I really value my content manager. He’s always there to help me unblock my writer’s block, or bounce ideas off of, or just tell me when I’m flat out doing something that totally makes no sense. And that kind of partnership and collaboration really helps make the content something that we’re able to ship quickly, while ensuring super high quality.”
Build with Udacity: Become an Instructor
Train the next generation of tech students while building your professional brand as an instructor. Udacity is always on the lookout for established industry professionals who want to partner with us to help drive the workforce’s skills in the jobs of the future.
