It's been a few months! There hasn't been much to talk about until recently.
I just completed my AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam with an 804 out of 1,000 and here's a few things I learned!
1) AWS has a LOT of services. 120 that I created flashcards for, to be exact. You can expect to be quizzed on any one of them and know what their purpose is. It's overwhelming at first, but breaking it down by category helps. There are lots of services that accomplish similar things, so having more than just a surface understanding helps.
2) I strengthened my understanding of networking and IT through an AWS lens. I already had a basic understanding of networking, but studying a comprehensive suite of services that AWS offers helped me review the basics and learn more about networking capabilities. Learning about AWS has me excited to deep dive further into other networking subjects and validates my decision that backend is the path for me.
3) I paid for the Enhanced Prep Course on AWS, which was tremendously helpful. Like with anything, the ability to seek outside resources is super important. Knowing how to Google further information on a subject, how to find YouTube videos, and search Reddit threads is INVALUABLE. I used Mohamed Ali's AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams on Udemy for $20 to prepare for the exam and they were tremendously helpful as well.
4) I realized setting a deadline is important. I spent a few months studying off and on, which is for sure helpful, but I never set a date for the exam. Things aren't real until there's a deadline, at least for me. It wasn't until I set a test date two weeks ahead of time, which gave me plenty of time to buckle down and get into the material, that I really took things seriously. A critical part of achieving your goals is figuring out where the finish line is.
For now, I'm going to enjoy a few weeks of downtime, but my sights are set on the CompTIA Network+ as my next venture. I've decided that due to the lack of available jobs in software engineering I will be pivoting to cybersecurity as my area of focus. It has enough elements of backend to remain interesting to me and seems to be one of the few fields that hasn't been completely run over by AI.
It's been a few months since I've checked in! I want to get better about that and post more regularly.
My time has mainly been split up between working on my AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification and job hunting.
Learning about AWS cloud has given me a lot of insight into back-end services and infrastructure. The curriculum covered some AWS specific things like pricing and AWS applications, but also general concepts like security and networking, which were most interesting to me. Studying best practices like the security principle of least privilege – grant only as much access as needed – is useful because it has applications across computing. Touching on some networking principles has also inspired me to look into some IT certifications to work on in the future. I want to get more in depth not only about how clients interface with servers, but how others servers and applications interact with each other. I'm looking into pursuing either the Red Hat's Certified System Administrator or Cisco's Certified Network Associate certification after I finish my Cloud certification.
Job hunting hasn't been very exciting so far. I've applied for about 70 different positions and have only heard back from one employer. It's pretty discouraging, but I guess that's part of the fun of starting your first job in a new field. It's important to cover as much ground as possible so instead of trying to apply to 50 jobs every day I'm going to prioritize implementing some passive ways to find jobs. One such way I'm doing this is teaming up with recruiting agencies in major tech cities such as here in the Bay Area, Boston, Austin, Seattle, and New York. Also, I think having some professional experience would help make me more competitive, so I will be looking into bidding on some projects on Upwork and Fiverr to help fill out my resume and portfolio.
As for the Cloud Practitioner exam, I'll be studying for the next few weeks to retain as much as possible and sign up for a testing date!
The job search continues! I spent the last week signing up for accounts on job search websites, uploading resumes, filling in profiles, tweaking search criteria, etc. My current goal is to apply to 25 jobs a week. How might I go about doing THAT you may ask?
I had a conversation with a couple of web developers the other month that was very insightful. I told these guys I was gearing up for a job search, had bought a few books, and was getting ready to jump into interview prep (very scary). One of them mentioned that these "whiteboard interviews" where potential candidates have to write a program or solve a problem using only a whiteboard is very much a characteristic of the West Coast and that there is a GitHub repository called Hiring Without Whiteboards that may be worth looking at.
What is Hiring Without Whiteboards? It is a list of companies that ask more real-world oriented problems in lieu of complex and, more importantly, unrelated questions. Is there a time and place for these complex/abstract questions? Absolutely. Does having the ability to solve these questions play a part in being a more competent coder? Sure! However, as an entry level applicant I want to focus on the fundamentals and aligning myself with companies that line up with my abilities ensures neither applicant nor employer are wasting their time.
This piece of information led me to another profound realization which is that I'm not confined to applying to jobs solely in the Bay Area. One of my biggest reasons for transitioning to tech is freedom of movement. While I'm not taking a van and driving around the country, it's nice to not have my job be limited to where I can drive my car back and forth every day. Further, a country-wide job search compared to a regional one allows me to cast a wider net.
In the meantime, I want to spend some time learning SQL on Udemy and start my AWS Certification.
Well that took a little longer than anticipated, but I've finally finished updating my website!
The main challenges I encountered were untangling my old CSS and uploading my projects.
CSS and the whole "cascade" feature definitely has it's virtues and makes things easier, but after not looking at my style sheet for about a year it took me a while to figure out what was going on. This reinforces the advice I've heard from countless coders, which is "Write clear and readable code!" Further, the organization was a little all over the place, so I made some changes to that as well. My website didn't lose much of it's responsiveness, but I'd like to go back and tidy a few things up at some point.
Where things got really interesting is navigating how to share my work! I have written projects in various IDEs and with varying amounts of libraries, so exporting those in a neat package proved to be more challenging than I had expected.
Greenfoot in particular has some real challenges with exporting projects. The whole point of exporting the project in the first place, in my mind, is to make it easy for someone to run it regardless of computer experience or operating system (portability). If your program is too large to post on their website like mine, you're faced with exporting to a .jar file that has very specific file paths that make it near impossible to share or exporting it as a .gfar file that a user requires Greenfoot to open. Not ideal.
I also faced challenges exporting my DoorDash app to a .jar file because of some coding choices I made when I had no intention of exporting it as a .jar file.
These challenges have inspired me to spend some time learning more about Maven to make sharing my Java work easier. I will spend some time working on these issues so that I can share my work in a more accessible way, but for now I'm happy to be able to share them at all.
I will also continue to upload my projects, but I'm also excited to turn my attention to working on interview prep, starting my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification, and actively applying to jobs.
Coming back to my website after a year is pretty strange.
I created this website after roughly 6 months of learning HTML/CSS and was (and, for the most part, still am) proud of it. That said, after having developing my own coding style/preferences I found myself cringing a bit while going through the source code. The most glaring problems were the formatting was not to my liking as well as organizational flaws in the code itself. It's interesting to come back and look at my first projects as well. While I'm tempted to go back and reformat some of them, I want to look forward and stay on track with my goals.
Starting this blog was one of my goals because it's a way for me to document my progress, hold myself accountable, and check in with myself (and whoever is reading). This is a simple HTML based blog, but in the future I want to move towards a PHP/SQL based blog. My web host has a code snippet to insert a PHP connection to a MySQL database but that would leave my username and password in the source code, so I want to learn how to insert that information from a server-side file.
I'm spending this week and some of the next going through and updating/refreshing some things on this website (mainly my portfolio). A lot of my projects are done in Java and Python, so while I want to upload them to my website it might make more sense to use GitHub, which I'm excited to spend more time with.
After my website is feeling more up to date I'll be actively applying to jobs, working on interview prep, and pursuing an AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. Stoked to get started!