Jasper Thornhill
Infrastructure LeadJasper spent eight years managing Kubernetes clusters before joining us. He's the one who insists students learn networking fundamentals before touching orchestration tools — and he's usually right about that.
Back in 2019, three of us were trying to explain Docker to yet another team that was struggling with deployments. We kept hitting the same wall — most training felt disconnected from what people actually needed to do on Monday morning.
So we started laptopchange with a pretty straightforward idea. Teach virtualization and containers the way we'd want to learn them ourselves — hands-on, practical, and tied to real scenarios that you'll face when building systems.
Six years later, we're still at it. Our approach hasn't changed much because it seems to work. Students spend more time configuring actual environments than watching slide presentations. They break things, fix them, and understand why both happened.
We're not trying to create certification collectors. We're here for people who want to understand how containerized applications actually run in production — and how to keep them running when things get messy.
Jasper spent eight years managing Kubernetes clusters before joining us. He's the one who insists students learn networking fundamentals before touching orchestration tools — and he's usually right about that.
Sienna came from a security background and brings that perspective to everything we teach. She's passionate about showing students how to build container workflows that won't keep them up at night worrying about vulnerabilities.
We measure success by what students can actually build and deploy. Most of our alumni are running containerized systems in their jobs within three months of finishing.
You'll spend way more time in terminals than in lecture halls. We believe the best way to understand container orchestration is to actually orchestrate some containers — including watching them fail and figuring out why.
Our labs are based on actual problems we've encountered. You won't be deploying hello-world apps. You'll be migrating legacy applications, debugging networking issues, and optimizing resource allocation for services under load.
We're upfront about what our programs can and can't do. Six months of training won't make you a senior DevOps engineer, but it will give you solid fundamentals and the ability to learn what comes next.
Container technology shifts constantly. We update our curriculum every semester based on what's actually being used in production environments — not what's just getting hyped on social channels.
We're accepting applications for our September and November cohorts. Programs run for six months and include hands-on labs, infrastructure projects, and troubleshooting workshops. Class sizes stay small so everyone gets actual feedback on their work.
Get Program Details
We run all our in-person sessions from our facility at 5445 Spring St in Mt Pleasant, Wisconsin. The space has dedicated server racks, workstations configured for container development, and enough whiteboards to diagram any architecture challenge.
Students can access the lab during open hours to work on projects, test deployments, or just get help when they're stuck. We also run remote programs for people who aren't local — same curriculum, just different delivery method.
Questions about our programs or facility? Reach us at contact@laptopchange.com or call +1 563-447-5827