Trainer's Union project has finally gathered momentum!

It was an idea of mine about 3 years back to create a business networking vertical around trainers and the training industry - to get trainers from all over the world (technical and non-technical trainers) into a community where they can interact and to provide a list of usability features (schedule calendar, contact network, references, profile and so on) and address common issues that most trainers would face in day-to-day activities. In simple words - my plan was to create a resource-hub site for trainers.

Now, with a team of people that I trained @ Slashprog Technologies, this project has gathered momentum. I'm happy that each team member has been motivated to take this up, learn challenging technologies, apply and try the same.

It's been 10 days now, and things are starting to shape up pretty well. Of course, the best part of this exercise is to ensure that each team member learn a lot of technologies, apply agile project development methodologies (XP, SCRUM, TDD) to get this project shaped up.

The TU project should ideally become the show-case for technical talent, hard-work and dedication of the team in general. Once the initial sprint is complete (Trainer component) - we should be getting the site live on a Staging server for extensive testing and continue development - adding features, fixing bug/issues sprint by sprint.

The team members have started to hack on Dojo Toolkit, JSON and 960.gs/Blueprint.css for the front end design/development. I was initially planning on plain PHP+SQLite/MySQL for the backend - but later thought of using CodeIgniter. But now I'm contemplating on using Rails3 for the backend/middle-tier. We are still on process of deciding the same.

Though my schedule is still hectic (hopping cities for corporate training assignments) - Mr. Thyagarajan Shanmugham has joined aboard to keep the wheel spinning while I'm away. A lot of developments are on pipe-line - time is the only limit.

Meanwhile, I've updated my friend's links - to blogs of my team members @ Slashprog