I’ve had drafts ready to post with some in-depth content but have been troubleshooting some open source to provide a detailed instruction. Apologies moving forward my goal for Q4 which for clarity Q4 starts for me in August in terms of planning and ends mid December. My sister told me she has only heard me explain timelines in quarters and I found that quirky but this is probably because I follow WallStreet a lot more than it appears externally.
Q4 Priorities
- CKA and CKS(CNCF) K8’s certifications to not only validate my knowledge but challenge myself at the command line interface nature of different exam types that are interesting angle of exams.
- CCSK I’ve collected the voucher and this is on my backlog at first I’d like to take on CCAK prior to this but felt this would be a better route and was able to obtain a 54% off.
- CISSP – this is a beast so with this being a second shot I’m planning September time frame and October due to the nature of the domains I was weak in and wanting to do more detailed studying
- DP-420, DP-100, SC-100, GCP Cloud Architect Professional – since I’ve lumped these together to not only show you the amount but feel these cloud certification whether multi-cloud or single CSP should be grouped.
Reflections
- I’m about done moving into a house from my last move back in 2020 this was by far the most stressful, if you are becoming a home owner my advice to you is take your time moving and plan +/- 6 months for furniture due to supply chain issues consistently affecting various furniture availability.
- Listen more to others. Communication is essential not only for being a professional but being a technical expert, this craft will not only help you in understanding concepts but effectively saving time.
- Economics are unpredictable but history tells us the cycles of recession that every news organization is proposing on television across 2022 will likely bleed into 2023 we’re experiencing supply chain issues moving from JIT (Just-in-time) to having an abundance of items on hand which will make companies change strategies.
- Google Cloud is a exciting platform I spent most of Q4 2021/Q1 2022 immersed in the documentation and start doing more labs for training I see a lot of ease in the UI/UX and functionality of this CSP is strong offerings. Market share of this is something to be on look for.
Strategies(Hacks)
- In the background I’ve been exploring deep dives into PowerShell/Cosmos DB(Exam DP-420)/Defender for Endpoint(Deep Dive) and many more that I can’t recall at this current moment. You’ll thank yourself once you commit yourself to elevate your understanding of more that one language especially PowerShell.
- Terraform remains a go to for many industry wide videos I’m constantly watching to keep up with the agility of IaC, I plan on the future publishing a article exploring Pulumi IaC and using SAST on it with open source. I plan to start building out on my GitHub repo on architecture in multi-cloud to include K8s cluster with a PoC. If you are trying to upskill highly recommend you to commit yourself to something like this because it not only understands the architecture but the coupling of services in multiple CSP’s and the power of IaC.
- I’ve accomplished a lot more than I imagined but at the expense of some time lost that would of been a little beneficial with a balance of reading, such as I did attempt CISSP well after CASP+ which was hard to change my mindset into the CISO Advisory background. This is a consistent challenge with technical backgrounds you have to be able to decipher these questions with cue’s that are asking specifically the right answer from a management perspective. I don’t take any failure with more than a night of thought and have to move on, while this is challenging for many I take this approach with much more relaxed mindset because I’ve done so many and you can’t win them all.
- Don’t overlook the fundamentals. I only bring this up because I dived deep into some DevOps tooling into my journey and it was pretty complex at that time to fully comprehend I was aimless in the approach and didn’t have my goals scoped out. Why does this matter? I continuously see people who are focusing on what they believe is a goal but its to broad. You’ll hear someone say I want to code and make some serious income for a organization well you have to dive deeper how does that look? Front-end development focused on Rust, JavaScript, TypeJS with a emphasis on Serverless Architecture. A statement like that might sound really complex and technical you break these down into buckets or “blobs” for my Azure folks to start collecting resources to learn and start working towards that.