By Shay Vatarescu, Associate Manager, Software Engineering, Red Hat
Last July Red Hat Research announced the launch of a collaboration between Red Hat Israel and Tel-Hai Academic College, which will soon become the 11th university in Israel. Since then, we have achieved important milestones in our collaboration, exposing more students and professionals from the northern part of Israel to Red Hat’s technologies.
In mid-September we held our first Tech Talks session, “Hybrid Cloud with OpenShift”, including two lectures. Nimer Naamneh, Software Engineer, gave a talk on containers, and Kasem Alem, Senior Software Quality Engineer, spoke on cluster management and Kubernetes. These talks were designed to prepare our audience for the deep dive session planned later in 2022.
At the end of October Ohad Anaf Levy, Senior Director, Software Engineering, Sandra Moldoveanu from Red Hat Academy, Noelia Morcillo Soriano, Marketing and Communications Specialist, and I introduced Tel-Hai students to Red Hat Academy (RHA) in a virtual event. Students were given access to seven technical courses on topics including RHEL, OpenStack, OpenShift, and more. These courses are highly recommended and relevant for college graduates as they work to enter industry. In addition to the access to RHA, students also had the opportunity to sign up for the Talent-Network, a resource that helps connect job seekers with companies seeking professionals.
In mid-December we held our second Tech Talks session, “Hybrid Cloud with OpenShift #2.” During the session Orit Wasserman, Partner Engineer, talked about OpenShift, and Ilan Pinto, Software Engineering Manager, discussed the future of hybrid cloud.
Over the winter semester, the Red Hat Beyond course was held in Tel-Hai, led by Barak Korren, Principal Software Engineer, and Professor Itai Sharon. This is the eighth time the course has been held in an academic institute in Israel, and the first time it was given in Tel-Hai. During the course, which was run in a hybrid format, 20 students participated, assembling four work groups of five students. Each group designed and developed their own web application from scratch in an open source environment. Twelve Red Hat mentors guided the students, gave code reviews, and helped students understand how a real software development team works, meets deadlines, and gives demos.
The course ended on January 22, 2023, in a final demo event at Margalit Start-up City building in Kiryat-Shemona, where each team presented their working applications to the mentors and to Eyal Edri, Senior Manager, and Doron Fediuck, Director of Software Engineering, both part of the leadership team in the Israeli site. The event was streamed live and recruiting managers, including Daniel Keler, attended, giving course graduates exposure for potential internships.
Red Hat Israel made an enormous effort to bring Red Hat’s culture, values, and technology to the students, graduates, and professional community in northern Israel. I look forward to seeing how this exciting effort continues in 2023. Thank you to the many Red-Hatters that made this possible, and special thanks to Eyal Edri, Avi Biton, Liad Kashtan and Rina Cohen Ben David.
