Getting Help

You've joined Upload Academy because we want to be able to speak to someone when you run into problems. That's what we're here for, because it's what you're paying for. So, allow us to take this opportunity to outline the services you get as part of your plan.

The best place to start is our private community.

Private community

When you're studying, it's never a good thing to become completely blocked on a technical problem. Our private community is based on Discord. It's a place for you to ask questions so that you can overcome technical problems and become unblocked as quickly as possible.

The community is designed to help with Upload Academy content and the technical challenges you'll face as you progress through that content.

Joining the private community

All you have to do is click this link and join up: join the Upload Academy Discord.

Getting the correct Discord role

Once you've joined, reach out to a member of staff to make sure you've got the correct role assigned and can see the right channels/content. Without the correct role, it's possible you'll sit there thinking you've joined the wrong server or have been ripped off... in actual fact, we simply lock access to content behind roles that we assign to people.

Make sure you reach out to a staff member to get the correct role assigned.

Walk-Ins

As part of your mentoring fee, we offer an "Walk-Ins" service. This is where our experts make themselves available for you to talk to live. This basically boils down to an expert being in a voice channel in Discord, and you simply join the channel, ask your question, and disconnect again.

This service is for overcoming the simple things. More complex topics should be discussed in your mentoring sessions as that's what they're there for.

Walk-In Availability

We try to make Walk-Ins available daily and as much as we can, but obviously we can't be available 24/7. With that said, the Walk-Ins service is generally available Monday to Tuesday, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST; we're in Brisbane) between the following hours:

And on Wednesdays:

Each Walk-Ins slot is 1.5 hours long.

These are the primary, core hours offered by Upload Academy, but as we add experts to our ranks, each in different timezones, this will open up and you'll gain access to us more often.

Each of these times translates to various timezones in the following manner (24 hour time):

Hopefully you can find a slot that works for you. We're also working on expanding this service to include more reasonable times in as many timezones as we can.

Weekly streams

We provide a weekly stream that you can optionally choose to join. We recommend that you do. The streams are just a bit of fun and an opportunity to learn something new whilst watching one of our experts work away at some technical problem. The floor is open for students to ask question via a text channel or live in the voice channel.

The streams cover problems that are always inside of our target audience's capabilities. That means you won't see us setting up globally distributed Kubernetes clusters with 1,000 miroservices handling billions of transactions per second... sorry about that!

Stream Schedule

The streams are weekly and run for 1.5 hours. They're scheduled as such:

Joining the weekly streams

Make sure you're connected to our Discord community and have the correct role assigned.

Once you've opened Discord and you're accessing the Upload Academy server, goto the "Premium Community" section and join the weekly-streams voice channel.

Is it on Discord or Zoom?

At this moment in time we run the streams in Discord in voice channel called weekly-streams. It's possible that we may need to move a stream to Zoom if the size of the audience is too big. At the moment we believe this means 100+ people, but we're unsure what the actual Discord limitations are. We'll simply dynamically switch between these two platforms as and when we need to.

With this in mind, it's recommended you have Zoom installed in case we do need to switch to a platform that can support 100+ people.

Mentoring sessions

Mentoring sessions don't really follow a strict workflow, but there is a basic structure in place designed to help you maximise your utility of the sessions.

We generaly follow this process:

Each mentoring session is generally a maximum of 60 minutes. Anything less is too short a period of time to do anything useful. Anything more is too taxing on everyone involved. That being said, you can totally book a 30 minute session if you wish. Sometimes students take a 30 minute sessions when things are going well.

Mock HR interviews

As we've discussed previously, there will come a time when you'll want to do some mock interviews. We're very happy to help in this regard, but this changes the structure of the session a lot (as you can imagine):

Once the session is complete, we'll discuss the results either in your next session (which we recommend you book earlier than you regularly would) or we can email you a results email like a real job. You just let us know what you'd like to see.

Mock Technical interviews

We also offer a technical interview process, which is almost identical to the mock interviews above, but instead of HR like questions, we'll interview you as though it's a second stage, technical interview. So everything from the mock interviews (above) applies here, except the question between the 10th and 55th minutes change from, "Tell us the difference between TCP and UDP" to something more along the lines of, "In the AWS console, create an ALB with an HTTPS listener".

These interviews are much more challenging and they come with an additional (optional) component: a recording of the session. We highly recommend you allow us to record these sessions and share the results with you (and only you - we promise) so that you can either learn from past performance and/or share the results with potential employers.

Chaos Engineering

You make it, we break it. This is like a technical interview, but we go over some live training exercises that involve you fixing existing (broken) infrastructure whilst we also continue breaking it in the background. That's about it. Simple.