David Dawson Code, philosophy, and the art of building
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Training & Workshops

• 4 min read

Technical Training That Makes a Difference

I deliver practical, hands-on training that helps development teams level up their skills in distributed systems and modern architecture patterns. My approach focuses on real-world application rather than academic theory - you’ll leave with knowledge you can apply immediately.

Available Training Courses

Microservices Architecture Fundamentals

Duration: 2-3 days
Format: On-site or remote

Learn how to design, build, and operate microservices architectures that actually work in production.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Service boundary identification using Domain-Driven Design
  • Communication patterns: REST, messaging, and event streaming
  • Data management strategies and the perils of distributed transactions
  • Service discovery, load balancing, and resilience patterns
  • Testing strategies for distributed systems
  • Operational concerns: monitoring, tracing, and debugging

Who Should Attend: Software developers and architects moving from monolithic to microservices architectures.

Event-Driven Architecture Workshop

Duration: 2 days
Format: On-site or remote

Master the patterns and practices of building truly reactive, event-driven systems.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Event Sourcing and CQRS patterns
  • Designing event schemas and evolution strategies
  • Building event processing pipelines
  • Handling eventual consistency
  • Error handling and compensation patterns
  • Using Kafka, EventStore, and other event streaming platforms

Who Should Attend: Teams building or maintaining event-driven systems.

Groovy & Grails Development

Duration: 3-4 days
Format: On-site or remote

From Java developer to Groovy expert - learn how to leverage Groovy’s power for rapid application development.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Groovy language fundamentals and idioms
  • Metaprogramming and DSL creation
  • Grails framework deep dive
  • GORM and data access patterns
  • Testing with Spock
  • Building RESTful APIs with Grails
  • Performance optimization techniques

Who Should Attend: Java developers looking to increase productivity with Groovy and Grails.

Distributed Systems Design Patterns

Duration: 2 days
Format: On-site or remote

Understand the fundamental patterns that make distributed systems work reliably at scale.

What You’ll Learn:

  • CAP theorem and its practical implications
  • Consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos basics)
  • Distributed data patterns: sharding, replication, partitioning
  • Saga pattern for distributed transactions
  • Circuit breakers, retries, and timeouts
  • Building for failure: chaos engineering principles

Who Should Attend: Developers and architects working on distributed systems.

Custom Training

I also develop custom training programs tailored to your team’s specific needs and technology stack. Whether you’re adopting Kubernetes, implementing event sourcing, or migrating to microservices, I can create a program that addresses your unique challenges.

Training Philosophy

My training approach is based on:

Hands-On Learning: We’ll build real systems, not just look at slides. Expect to write code, break things, and fix them.

Real-World Focus: Every pattern and practice is illustrated with examples from actual production systems, including war stories of what went wrong.

Interactive Sessions: Questions and discussions are encouraged. The best learning happens when we challenge assumptions.

Practical Takeaways: You’ll leave with working code examples, reference architectures, and decision frameworks you can use immediately.

What Others Say

“David’s microservices training transformed how our team thinks about system design. We went from a tangled mess of services to a well-structured architecture in just a few months.” - Tech Lead, Financial Services

“The event-driven architecture workshop was exactly what we needed. David helped us understand not just the ‘how’ but more importantly the ‘why’ and ‘when’.” - CTO, E-commerce Startup

“Best technical training I’ve attended. Perfect balance of theory and hands-on practice.” - Senior Developer, Logistics Company

Logistics

Group Size: 6-20 participants for optimal interaction
Location: On-site at your offices or remote via video conferencing
Materials: All participants receive comprehensive course materials, code examples, and reference implementations
Follow-up: One month of email support included for questions that arise during implementation

Book Your Training

Ready to level up your team’s distributed systems skills? Let’s discuss your training needs.

Email: Contact for training inquiries
Availability: Booking 2-3 months in advance

Many teams benefit from combining courses:

  • Microservices Starter: Microservices Fundamentals + Event-Driven Architecture (4 days)
  • Full Stack Groovy: Groovy & Grails + Microservices with Spring Boot (5 days)
  • Distributed Systems Deep Dive: Design Patterns + Event-Driven Architecture (4 days)

Let’s build something great together.