Marakana is a privately-held company based in San Francisco, CA. Since 2001, Marakana has been helping IT professionals get better at what they do by providing an extensive range of training services on open source software solutions and agile practices. The Around Dublin Blog is teaming up with our friends at Marakana to offer our readers a 10% discount on any course from their extensive training catalog. To qualify for this discount, simply type “Around-Dublin-Blog” when prompted for the coupon code during the course registration process.

The idea for Marakana started with a Craigslist ad. A local non-profit in San Francisco was looking for a technical instructor to help teach some Java classes. This non-profit’s mission was to bridge the Digital Divide by helping underprivileged youth, minorities and women get into high-tech jobs. The classes would be fully booked within hours of their announcements. Encouraged by the overwhelming demand and the success of the participants, the founders of Marakana started offering open source training to corporations and governments. Today, Marakana provides open source training all over the world with a focus on enterprise open source.

Marakana’s training is developed and delivered by people who dedicate themselves to the open-source idea and its community. Marakana’s involvement in the community goes from providing complimentary technology examples to hosting special interest groups and seminars. As technologies evolve, Marakana will update its courses to reflect the changes. This commitment to staying on the cutting edge means that students always get the training that counts.

Marakana’s engaging instructors have superb hands-on experience with the technology they teach. Many of them are well-respected experts on the subjects they teach and have written books about them. As a result, the instructors have the ability to go beyond the curriculum and illustrate examples inspired by course participants or their specific project goals. The Around Dublin Team has first-hand experience with two of Marakana’s courses. The Ruby on Rails Course and the Google Maps API Training Course both met and far exceeded our high expectations, and we are very much looking forward to the Advanced Rails Training Course by Dr. Wolfram Arnold.