Announcing a self-paced learning platform and preview of LearnCTL

The beginning of 2026 also marks the start of my 26th year in the IT industry. Being an 80s kid and having joined the IT industry in the early 2000s, I have seen and experienced different waves of computing, from bare-metal systems to virtualization, to containers and Kubernetes, to generative AI. I was fortunate to participate in and contribute to each of these waves of computing. My work at Wipro and Dell Technologies enabled me in this journey. This was a great learning experience, and applying those skills at work is the most satisfying part. Outside my role at these companies, I benefited immensely from online and offline technical communities. I have learned from many experts in several areas. At the same time, I started giving back to the community. I started PowerShell Magazine back in 2011, and while it was at the top of the game, it provided the most in-depth technical content to help the PowerShell community learn. I moved on from PowerShell as a tool for automation and started focusing on Linux, containers, Kubernetes, and eventually on Artificial Intelligence.

Over the years, I have not been very active in technical communities, but my interest in sharing my knowledge with them never died down. I authored a few books and wrote sparingly on this blog. But one idea always stuck with me. I have always wanted to create a free, open, and self-paced learning platform. I wanted to publish bite-sized learning modules across multiple programming languages and technologies that I have been learning and using. For hands-on learning, I have used and benefited from platforms like The Best DevOps Online Training Courses | KodeKloud, Killercoda Interactive Environments, and Ivan’s iximiuz labs. These innovative platforms offer learners a great way to practice various technologies. While I don’t want to create a commercial platform like one of these, I wanted to build a local playground for practicing technologies such as containers and Kubernetes. I attempted to make these ideas a reality. I built different content-sharing platforms using the Hugo static site generator. I worked on creating Hugo themes for the same. I always believed that I didn’t need a fancy hosted platform and a mix of complex technologies to deliver this learning platform. This was the prep work. For the local playground, I learnt Go and experimented with creating CLIs and TUIs. I wrote a book on developing CLIs and TUIs in Go. With generative AI, I have learnt a bunch of frameworks, SDKs, and built prototype applications. The evolving landscape of coding agents has certainly played a role in accelerating my work towards today’s announcement.

What I am announcing today is the result of years of work across these different technologies. I am happy to announce an open, free, and self-paced learning platform – learn.ravichaganti.com. I have started building the courses on this platform with Python Fundamentals as the first fully available course. The remaining courses will become available in the next few weeks.

To complement this reading, I am also working on a local playground available as a command-line tool. It is called LearnCtl. LearnCtl provides an interactive local playground where learners are given hands-on tasks of varying difficulty. This interactive playground also comes integrated with an AI tutor. This tutor can help you learn more about the task and guide you toward completing it, or help you learn more about the topic. Your progress gets tracked locally, and you own your learning journey. There will be timed learning tasks to help you prepare for exams like CKA, CKAD, and CKS. LearnCtl embeds deliberate practice and spaced repetition at its core.

Both learn.ravichaganti.com and LearnCtl go hand in hand. For technology tracks such as Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Bicep, the online learning platform will provide the reading material, and LearnCtl will provide hands-on exercises.

learn.ravichaganti.com is online and ready for you to start your learning journey. I always welcome your feedback on how to improve this platform. LearnCtl is still cooking and should be ready for a preview in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I look forward to your feedback and suggestions. If you want to contribute course modules, please reach out to me.