For many infrastructure professionals, the brave new world of automation and DevOps is a bit scary. The problem isn't that they're not capable of learning new things, it's that "automation" can be very ambiguous. There are so many different ways to introduce automation into our systems, and it can be extremely challenging to know where to start.

This "first mile" of learning is something that the open-source Antidote project (and it's reference curriculum, NRE Labs) intends to address. Antidote is designed to make it easy for learners to get started with a variety of automation lessons, by containing a fully interactive infrastructure automation environment entirely in the browser. It also makes it easy for those with something to teach, by representing all curriculum resources as simple text files stored in Git.

By the end of this talk you will:

- Understand more deeply the problem space Antidote intends to address
- Know the technical basics of how the Antidote project works
- Learn how you can get involved with the Antidote project and the open-source NRE Labs curriculum