Bespoke Team Training

Training built around the decisions your team will make on Monday. Two pillars, Cassandra and AI coding, taught by practitioners who use both in production every week.

Best for: Engineering teams adopting Cassandra or Kubernetes stateful workloads, platform teams onboarding to data infrastructure, working engineers who need to get productive with AI coding tools, and leadership groups making cloud-native data or AI tooling strategy decisions.
Engagement shape: On-site or virtual delivery, scoped and priced per engagement. Bespoke materials, edited to the team in the room.
Typical triggers: An engineering team adopting Cassandra or stateful Kubernetes workloads and needing a shared vocabulary fast.
Working engineers who need to get genuinely productive on AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows), not just demo them.
Engineering managers setting norms on AI-assisted development before it spreads on its own.
Leadership wanting a half-day strategy session on cloud-native data or AI coding before committing budget.
What you walk away with: Live delivery by a senior practitioner who uses these tools in production, not a trainer running someone else's slides.
Workshop materials your team keeps: slides, code samples, reference architectures, prompt patterns.
A real artifact the team produced during the session, against your codebase where possible.
A follow-up call once the material has hit real code.

The problem

Most technical training is content delivery with no memory. Someone reads slides, your team nods, and three weeks later nobody can recall the difference between a partition key and a clustering key, let alone design a table that will not fall over at year two. The same is now true of AI coding training: generic vendor decks about prompt engineering that do not survive contact with your actual repo.

The training that sticks is built around the decisions your team will face on Monday. Not “here is every feature of Cassandra.” Not “here are ten ways to prompt.” Here is the data modeling decision you are about to make. Here is the agent workflow you should be using on your codebase. Here are the three ways each of them breaks in production.

We have been teaching Cassandra and cloud-native data for more than a decade through DataStax Academy, conference workshops, the O’Reilly book, and fifty-plus talks. We have been using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows) in our own advisory work every day for the past year. Both pillars of the training are taught by people who do the work, not people who only teach it.

Two pillars

Cassandra and cloud-native data

The discipline we have been teaching the longest. The workshops have been edited down to the parts that change how teams work when they go back to their desks.

Cassandra Data Modeling. One-day intro or two-day deep dive for application and backend engineers.
Kubernetes for Data Engineers. One day for platform and data engineers.
Cloud-Native Data Strategy for Leadership. Half-day session for CTOs, VPs Data, and architects.
Migration Planning Workshop. One day for engineering leads running a migration.

AI coding for engineering teams

The pillar most teams are hiring for right now. How to get real productivity out of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows) on your codebase, not in a vendor demo. We teach this from a year of using these tools in production advisory work.

AI Coding Fundamentals. One day for working engineers. Tool selection, prompt patterns that work, context management, when to use AI and when not to. Hands-on against your codebase.
AI Coding for Team Leads. Half-day for engineering managers. Setting norms, what to review, what to commit, how to onboard new hires onto AI-assisted workflows without quality drift.
Agent Workflows for Engineering. One day for senior engineers. Multi-step agents, custom tooling, hooks, when an agent is the right shape and when a one-shot prompt is.

Bespoke

Every workshop is edited to the team in the room. The default is a custom engagement built from the pieces above, scoped on a call.

What you get

Live delivery by a senior practitioner, not a trainer running someone else’s slides
Workshop materials your team keeps: slides, code samples, reference architectures, prompt patterns, and a real artifact they produced during the session
A follow-up call once the material has hit real code, to answer questions that have surfaced
The right to reuse internal materials inside your company indefinitely

How it works

We scope the engagement on a call with the team lead. After that we send a written proposal with the workshop shape, the team it is built for, and a project fee.

Before. A scoping call with the team lead to understand what your engineers are actually working on. We edit the workshop to match: your codebase, your stack, the decisions in front of you.

Delivery. On-site by default. Morning sessions are lecture and discussion. Afternoon sessions are hands-on, against a real problem or a real piece of your codebase. The hands-on part is what people remember.

After. A follow-up call once the material has hit real code, team-wide. Questions, corrections, and a check on whether the workshop landed.

Vendor training teaches you the product. Bespoke training teaches your team. Those are different things, and the second one is what changes how the work gets done.

Questions teams ask

What makes the AI coding workshop different from a vendor's training?

The vendor will teach you their tool. We teach your team how to use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows) to actually ship faster on your codebase. We have been doing this in our own advisory work for a year. The failure modes are specific and the wins are specific. The workshop is built around both.

Can you train a distributed team virtually?

Yes, as half-day blocks instead of full days. Virtual training at full-day length does not work well. Attention collapses. We deliver virtual sessions as half-day blocks.

Can you train our customers, not just our team?

Sometimes, if the material fits and the commercial shape makes sense. Tell us on the scoping call.

Do you license the workshop materials without you delivering them?

No. The materials work because the practitioner is in the room.

We want Cassandra certification. Do you do that?

No. DataStax Academy does certification. We do the training that changes how teams write code.

Can the workshop feed directly into an advisory retainer?

It can. Several advisory clients started as workshop clients. We will not upsell from the workshop floor. If you want to continue, book a separate conversation.

What is the right workshop to start with?

For a team new to Cassandra, the one-day data modeling intro. For a team trying to get AI coding tools into their workflow, the AI coding workshop. For leadership, the half-day strategy session.

Let’s look at it together.

Bring us whatever you're wrestling with. A new architecture, a migration plan, a bill that keeps growing, a team that needs a sounding board. Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll tell you what we see.

Book a 30-minute introduction call hello@mcfad.in