AWS Certification Progress
In March, I achieved the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. In May, I decided to go for the Associate Solutions Architect certification. It’s a lot more in depth than Cloud Practitioner, but I’m looking forward to coming out the other side.
To prepare, I bought the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2020 course on Udemy. Because it was on sale, and I’m cheap.
What Motivates Me in My Job?
One of the tasks in Apprenticeship Pattens was to come up with 15 things that motivate you in your career. In no particular order:
- Making things, and doing it well.
- The money is good. Might be tacky to say it out loud, but I’m not complaining.
- Working on things that will hopefully have a positive impact on the world.
- I’m very lucky to have found work that is very close to play.
- Working on something as a team.
- Getting the chance to teach people things and elevate them to your level.
- Creating an ordered system out of a mess of ideas and requirements.
- The cool programmer aesthetic.
- Being able to (largely) plan out my own days, and come up with my own solutions to things.
- Flexing creative muscles.
- The tools! Software is cool.
- The hardware.
- Being able to surround myself with people much smarter than I am.
- Having an opportunity to write regularly.
- There’s always something to learn.
And then it asked for five more.
- It’s a respectable profession.
- Software is unlikely to be replaced or eliminated any time soon.
- The community has some amazing people in it.
- I get to contribute positively to my part of the community.
- I have flexibility to work remotely, or at odd hours.
Things I Read
- Test-Driven Development: By Example - Surprisingly breezy reading for a book about writing tests. I was careful to follow along with the examples, and I think I gained a lot from it. It has chapters towards the back for some nice testing/design patterns.
- Apprenticeship Patterns - It’s intended for people earlier on in their career than me, but it’s packed with good advice.
- Conventional Commits - A specification for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages.
- The Self-Contained Test - Self-contained tests can display intent and self-document better than “DRY” tests.
- The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet - The exciting story of Marcus Hutchins, a.k.a MalwareTech.
- When The Pager Goes Off - An article from Increment Magazine about the on-call and incident response processes of several large companies.
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win - A wonderful novel about overhauling the IT department of a car parts company.
