Introduction
At Root Commit, we use Matrix chatrooms to offer support during practical labs as well as outside course hours. This makes it very easy for you to ask questions, share screenshots (just by pasting into the chat), get help from the instructors and other participants, and learn from everyone’s experience.
The Matrix protocol is also end-to-end encrypted and it will protect the privacy of our conversations, especially in private sessions.
Therefore, when you register to one of our courses, you will be granted access to a dedicated chatroom on matrix.org:
- A private chatroom for private sessions – Only participants from your company will see the discussions.
- A dedicated chatroom for public sessions – In this case, other users from other companies (and from other sessions of the same type) will see your questions, but will be able to help you too. Helping others also helps to learn, and we encourage collaboration between participants.
Get a Matrix account
The first thing to do is to create an account on https://matrix.org. If you already have one on another Matrix instance, that will work too, as Matrix is decentralized.
To create your new account on matrix.org, you could go directly to its Element web client.
Please also associate your real name to your account (even though the account identifier can be anonymous). We need this to make sure that each participant is indeed a Root Commit customer, and like in real life, it’s important to know who we are interacting with.
Once you have your account, you will have to choose a Matrix client. Element is one we can recommend:
- You could use its web client directly on the PC running the labs. This way, it will be easy to capture screenshots and paste them into the chat.
- You could also use the other Element clients, typically one your smartphone. That’s convenient to participate to chatroom activity, typically to get notified of new messages, when you are away from your computer.
Join the chatroom
Once you have a Matrix account, you should share your account identifier with us using this form, to get access to the chatroom. Your identifier can be found by clicking on your profile icon on the Element client (for example). In the below example, it’s @michael.o:matrix.org:
FAQ
Q: How long will I have access to the chatroom? Will it be available after the course too?
A: Yes, you will be able to access it as long as you want to, even months or years after the course is over. The goal is to let you ask questions or share experience on the topics covered by our courses. And if we ever need to migrate our chatroom to another server, you will eligible to use the new one too.
Q: How to get notified about updates to the course materials?
A: Through the chatroom as long as you are interested in the topic. This way, you will be notified whenever new labs are available, or when new hardware is supported. Trying new labs or doing the labs again on different hardware is a great way to make things stick.
Q: Will I be able to ask questions from real-life projects too?
A: Or course, as long as your questions are related to the course topics. Learning doesn’t stop when the course is over. We prefer that you ask your questions in the main chatroom, so that more people can benefit from your experience and the answers you get, but if your question could reveal sensitive information about your products, you can also ask it through a private message.
Q: Can I really get technical support this way after the course is over?
A: Yes, as long as the answers can benefit others in the chatroom, and as the time answering your questions remains reasonable. If too much time is needed, we’ll be happy to share pointers with you, or to propose dedicated services to address a specific need.