October Recap & November Outlook
Camille Francis
[Offered]
Welcome to the first End of Month Round Up! This is something that my accountability group like to do to reflect on the goals we set at the beginning of the month, so it’s only right that I cement these reflections here.
Brief Overview
October was heavily focused on finishing the last stretch of interviews strong, making big career decisions, navigating through career dilemmas, and trying to tailor my upskilling path through the uncertainty. I always aim to get 1 or 2 small projects done per month, on top of progressing with my passion project ‘Study Bud-e’ – an email-based sudy resource powered by AWS.
Job Hunting and Navigating Career Dilemmas
For the most part, I’ve been enjoying the job hunting grind. It can definitely be tiring after a while, especially having interviews every week, and even two interviews per day on a few occasions. But having friends to share this journey with was instrumental in helping me to elevate and stay dialed in. It also definitely helps if you’re interviewing for companies you like, with potential managers that you click with, and roles you’re passionate about. Not all my interviews have been like this, so this time around I was in a great position.
The roles I was interested in applying for were Cloud and Cyber Security roles – two very separate domains in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is new to the tech landscape, it’s good to keep your options open when applying, but definitely understand that the wider you cast your line, the more difficult it can be when interviews start lining up. I can describe the experience first-hand as being similar to a theatre performer trying to play the role of two characters who are on stage at the same time. Although there was some minor overlap, tailoring my prep and upskilling was definitely a balancing act to accomodate for the likelihood of landing a role in either domain. It was a great problem to have though, and I felt very blessed and proud of the hard work I put in.
This topic can be a whole blog post in and of itself, so I can go into more detail in the future.
Knowledge and Skill Development
Some of the key points for upskilling that I focused on were: Networking, Linux and Bash Scripting, Python, AWS Solutions Architect studying, and AWS projects. For anyone fresh off the AWS re/Start bootcamp, you will want to revisit topics from earlier on in the course. Networking and Linux were my topics of choice.
Networking is the foundation of IT, so it’s not something you should (or can) run away from. I took a good 2 weeks to really get a good handle on key protocols and actually practiced implementing them on AWS and other practical challenge websites. After all that, I’m proud to say that I feel confident applying networking principles to my projects, and it has improved my decision making, as well as my implementation of security measures. The confidence I’ve gained from sharpening my understanding of networking has been invaluable, so I highly recommend understanding the basics well.
Linux and the CLI was another key skill I revisited this month, as it’s been on my radar since I graduated from AWS re/Start. I like the versatility, control, and depth that Linux provides, and it also tied in well with my networking studies, so it was a great time optimiser too. I’ll make a separate post about useful linux resources I’ve compiled, but Linux Journey and Bandit were two notable ones. I especially enjoyed playing the Bandit Linux game collaboratively with my accountability group, because it made it fun and even more rewarding to complete, so I highly recommend. For practice, I used Ubuntu WSL, since I wasn’t practicing anything too risky. However, using a VM such as VirtualBox is definitely the safer option that I would recommend.
Project Updates
This month I worked on notable projects such as my passion project ‘Study bud-e’, as well as creating this WordPress blog you’re reading from. Other less notable projects were a hangman python code, as well as some disposable AWS practice deployments.
Creating this blog was something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and it was a great way to tie in the Linux and networking knowledge I was developing over the month. I was able to put it all into practice when I created and configured the VPC, as well as configuring security groups and IAM roles for the EC2, route 53, ELBs, and S3. I faced multiple challenges, and made many visits to Stack Overflow, but it was a great experience. I learned so much not only on the AWS side of things, but also with web development and operating WordPress. All of which will come in useful for my passion project.
My passion project ‘Study Bud-e’ was based on a project that me and my colleagues from the bootcamp planned to complete post-program. It was initially going to be an email subscription study resource deployed using AWS resources (Lambda, RDS, S3, SES). But after my exam, I decided to bring it to life by developing it further. I have a dedicated blog post in the works, so I won’t go into too much detail, but this month I started to redo the HTML, JS, and CSS code to make it more functional, and less prone to error. I also decided to take my time and thoroughly develop the project from the outset, as I know it will save me time in the future. I have big plans of releasing it as a web app one day, so I want to do it the right way.
The Outlook To November
My main points of focus this month will be centred around preparing for my upcoming role. I’ll continue to study AWS to prepare for the role, as well as prepare to take the SAA-C03 exam. I will also be keeping on top of my projects, with the aim of finishing the webpages and database portions for Study Bud-e. Since I’m preparing for a Cyber Engineering role, I will also continue with Python and work my way through the 100 days of Code Udemy course. The final goal I set out to achieve is having a better work-life balance, and being disciplined with taking breaks and leisure time now that my interviews are over.
OCTOBER outlook summary
- Interviews and preparations
- Created my WordPress blog AWS project
- Studied networking
- Linux and Bash scripting
- Re-planned Study Bud-e
NOVEMBER outlook summary
- Studying for AWS SAA C03
- Python – ‘100 Days of Code’ course
- Job role preparations
- Study Bud-e development
- Exercising a healthy work-life balance
About us
I’m an AWS re/Start graduate (Sept 22) who is starting up in the world of tech. Stick around to follow my journey…
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