That’s always what happens, right? New website and lots of excitement, then other priorities creep in. Ah well.
Let’s see, what has happened since my last post. Quite a bit, it looks like. I took both the SAP and Security specialty exams, and passed both pretty handily. SAP is the beast that everyone says it is – the questions are very detailed, and there are so many components to consider. It’s just far less black and white than the associate level exams. Security wasn’t too bad, but I think that might be because I have a long infosec background – I’ve been realizing there are a lot of things I take for granted as general IT knowledge that is more specialized than I realized.
I also passed the AI Practitioner exam. AI is on my radar, but I hadn’t really taken the time to dig too deeply into it. I’d been around LLMs and neural networks for a LOOOONG time at RIT, so I had a pretty good understanding of how they worked, and what the training process looked like. I wanted to dig deeper, though, so I could talk about AI more intelligently and practically when thinking about implementation. I stumbled upon an AWS Partner program with a couple weeks of online sessions and a 50% off voucher for the exam, which felt fortuitous. I keep finding certification programs force me to dig into areas of knowledge I wouldn’t necessarily pick up on my own, and there’s nothing like an impending exam date to keep me focused. As I’d hoped, I learned a whole lot about the variations in AI models, training, and tuning in general, as well as the best options for implementation on AWS. Definitely a productive use of six weeks.
I’ve also changed jobs since the last blog post. I was laid off from Mindgrub Dec 1, 2023. I was shocked at the time, but with a little reflection, it wasn’t that surprising. MG was going through some financial issues, and there really wasn’t enough cloud work for 2 engineers. Of course, you’re going to keep the guy who built out most of the systems, and get rid of the new guy. MG was a bit of a baptism by fire for me – I learned a whole lot quickly, but at times it was like drinking from a firehose. Climbing on top of that knowledge did a whole lot for my confidence and skills, though. It also helps that I landed on my feet quickly. I had a signed offer from Precise Software Solutions before Christmas – better pay, better benefits, and a more balanced pace as well as still being remote. So all in all, things could be a whole lot worse.
Precise is primarily a federal contractor, so I work on whatever contracts I’ve been approved to work on. There are plusses and minuses to working for the federal government. On the plus side – there’s far more emphasis on getting it RIGHT than I’ve seen before. Most work I’ve done, there’s a balance between getting it done fast, and getting it done well, and most leadership leans hard into fast over well. It feels a bit like a luxury to really have the time to design out good solutions, test them thoroughly, and track down all of those little things that aren’t working quite right. The downside, though, is that part of the reason you have this time is that there is often a lot of bureaucracy, and there’s a fair bit of waiting getting approvals for various changes.
It’s interesting. My dad worked in the federal government for most of his career, and I find myself thinking and saying many of the same things he did about his work. It’s bittersweet, though. He passed away before I started at Precise, and there have been so many times I wished I could have called him up and talked about what I was learning about navigating the federal system. But in some ways it’s helped me understand my dad better. It’s not something I considered when I took the job, but it’s been a really nice bonus.
Professionally, I don’t really know what’s next. I was looking back at my last post, and I still had the same question – what’s the next skill worth acquiring? On my list before was Terraform, Kubernetes, and another cloud provider. I’m actively using Terraform now, so that’s covered. I started a Kubernetes course, but stalled a bit when I had more work/life responsibilities. I’m still firm on avoiding Azure if I can. It’s fine, but it’s not the way I like to work, and so far it’s not been a problem. So, I guess work on Kubernetes until I have a good working knowledge of it, then maybe pivot to picking up a GCP cert or two. I also might dig deeper into Akamai. We’re using them for our CDN, and it’s capable of so much. We’ll see what time and focus let’s me tackle.
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