Tag: Bias For Action

Routinely Solicited Inquiries

Routinely Solicited Inquiries

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When I joined Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2019, I wanted to validate the experience I had through AWS Certification. It become something of an obsession, and I ended up passing all 12 exams within a year. I got frequent questions about this experience, enough that I developed a talk that I gave at a couple internal conferences, and once at re:Invent. This post is my best attempt to capture what I said there, plus some additional information that might be of interest to anyone seeking to up their cloud game.

Why?

The first question I typically get is a variant of “Why did you pursue AWS certifications?” And that’s usually followed-up with “And why so many of them? Did you actually absorb any of that information?”

There are plenty of places to get boilerplate answers to these questions, such as Benefits of Being AWS Certified and Four reasons you should pursue AWS certifications. For me it boiled down to wanting the broadest possible exposure to AWS services. Certifications were not the end of my cloud learning journey, they were the beginning of it. I’m a breadth person; my goal was not to get hands-on experience with everything, but rather to get high-level understanding so that I could apply the technology to customer problems. I also wanted to be able to have public verification of the skills I already had.

Is there also a depth benefit to certs? Yes, but the study approach is different than the one I present later in this article. You’ll want to focus more on hands-on workshops and less on purely information intake. Neither approach is better or worse, they simply have different end objectives.

Who?

Another common question is “Who should get AWS certified?” I’m admittedly biased, but given they’re relatively inexpensive and can only benefit one’s career, I tend to say yes to just about everyone who works in or around the cloud:

  • Technology professionals specifically tasked to build in AWS? Obviously.
  • Software engineers who might be called upon to do cloud things, and should know what’s out there so they don’t inadvertently re-create the wheel? Definitely.
  • Tech adjacent folks like product / project / program managers and salespeople who want to be able to hold their own in cloud-related conversations? Can’t hurt.
  • Executives whose companies heavily utilize the cloud? Why not?

How?

Hopefully by now you’re convinced, so the next question is obvious: “How can I decide which certification(s) to pursue?” There’s decent guidance in the AWS Certification Paths brochure (which I like to take some credit for, as I both recommended its development to the Training & Certification team back at re:Invent in 2021, and consulted with them on its content), but I’ll add my two cents here as well.

Cloud Practitioner is the foundational exam, appropriate for anyone who wants to beef up their AWS knowledge no matter their role. Even for folks that already have cloud experience, I recommend they take this first just to learn the logistics of the exams. Lean into your bias for action here and just do it; at the time of this writing it’s only $100 and there’s no consequence for failing (which is true for all the exams).

After that one, I think Solutions Architect Associate is the best next step, as it’s a great introduction to solving problems on AWS. For technical folks especially it’s my first recommendation, and for non-techies who still need to hold their own in a cloud conversation it’s a perfect stretch goal.

From there, it starts to depend on role, but for those who have to wear a lot of hats the aim should be either Solutions Architect Professional or DevOps Engineer Professional (ideally both), and to prep for them there’s value in picking up SysOps Administrator Associate and Developer Associate as study guides. The material builds on itself, but be aware there’s a considerable jump in difficulty between the associate and professional exams.

Because passing an exam earns you a coupon for 50% off your next one, completing all the foundational, associate, and professional exams can be done for as little as $625. That’s not a large investment to pick up highly marketable certifications.

The specialty exams are different in several ways. For one, they contain much more completely new material compared to the way the professional exams build on associate exams (with one exception: if you have all the general certs, you’re 80% of the way to getting the Security Speciality). So if you’re a novice, expect to invest quite a bit more study time. I can’t really recommend any of these over any others unless you either 1) have a specific interest area, or 2) have completionist compunctions like me.

Fun fact: Advanced Networking Specialty is the only certification exam I’ve failed. It took a month of pretty hardcore cramming to get it passed the second time around, and I came away with a new respect for networking engineers. There be dragons.

When?

Once you have a certification identified, the next logical question is “When should I schedule the exam?” My hot take is to take a best guess on prep time, pick a date that works for you, and get registered.

(Quick aside: I strongly recommend creating your certification account using a personal email address, so that your certifications easily follow you if you change jobs. There are ways to fix this later, but it’s a hassle).

Actually forking over the money and scheduling a date and time will force you to get started. I’ve seen too many “good intentions” fail here due to over-cautiousness or indifference. Just do it! For one thing, you can always reschedule later. Second, as I said earlier, there’s no consequence for failure (other than a 2 week cooldown period before you can try again). Treat it an investment to see where you’re at. If you don’t pass, at least now you know where you’re weak. And if you do pass, then you’ve passed, no more studying required! All considered, it’s the frugal choice.

If you want a rule of thumb for prep time, here’s my suggestion:

  • If you’re reasonably confident, schedule it ASAP. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait.
  • If you just need to do some brushing up, 1-2 weeks of prep should be fine.
  • If you’re starting from zero, budget 4-6 weeks for foundational tests, 6-8 for associate-level, and 10-12 for professional exams.

If you literally have no idea how ready you are, taking a practice exam is an excellent evaluative tool that you can do right now. AWS made these free last year, just go register on Skill Builder and you’ll find them. They’ll provide you much helpful context on areas you’re strong in, and areas where you need to do more studying. Since there’s now no cost to taking them, there’s no excuse not to just go try them out. Don’t think you have to prepare to take a practice exam; that’s backwards. Let the practice exam results guide your preparation instead.

Where?

Once you’ve got your timeline to an exam, it’s time to answer “Where can I find the best possible preparation materials?” Naturally Google and ChatGPT have a variety of suggestions here. Too many. The metric that matters most here is “density of relevant knowledge per unit of study time”, and while I acknowledge people learn differently and everyone’s needs are different, my opinions here are based on my own considerable experience. Take them with a grain of salt, but only one…

When it comes to high value tools, my number one suggestion is to read AWS service FAQ pages. Most services have one, and they are written at just the right level of detail to be applicable to certification exams. They’re the nutrient-rich superfoods of certification study materials; nothing will get you up-to-speed faster. When I was in the midst of my test-taking prep, I would keep a dozen or so FAQ pages open in my phone’s browser, and instead of mindlessly doom-scrolling on social media, if I had a few minutes I’d read (or re-read) one or two of them.

To give you an idea of their effectiveness, when I re-certified my professional exams earlier this year, the only prep I did was to re-read FAQs across a couple dozen services, and I passed them both with equivalent or higher scores than I did three years ago.

Each certification has a guide that lists the AWS services covered on the exam. Take a look, find the FAQs, and dig in:

Another excellent resource are the courses on AWS Skill Builder. Many of these are also free, and $29 a month unlocks a bunch more. Each exam has a corresponding “readiness training” that is well-worth the few hours investment it takes to complete. And check out the ramp-up guides if you need a plan structured around job role, solution, or industry.

If more in-depth course material is needed, I’m a fan of the A Cloud Guru video courses: they’re comprehensive, well-produced, easy to navigate, and a subscription is reasonably priced. A number of them also include hands-on exercises.

While I’m not here to criticize quality, or tell people what ought to work for them, there are certain resources I found less helpful when “value per time unit” is considered.

The first is books on the certification exams. Besides taking focused time to read versus a video which can be put on in the background (something I did often when doing other activities like laundry or dishes), books age quickly. I also found their content of middling quality compared to more official sources. They’re not cheap either when compared to the broad value you get from a subscription to Skill Builder or A Cloud Guru.

AWS whitepapers, while interesting and educational, are also not a terribly rich source of certification-related knowledge. I contributed to a few whitepapers in my time at Amazon, so it’s not that I see them as valueless, nor am I biased against them. There are simply better ways to spend your time.

Finally, I discourage endless grinding on practice exams. I mentioned earlier that these exams are great evaluative tools, but their value drops significantly with repeated attempts. There’s little sense in taking a ton of them in the hopes of encountering (and memorizing) every possible question. The official ones are not comprehensive enough, and the other practice exams you can find online are of questionable quality (if not blatant rip-offs of superior material). Ultimately such an approach won’t give you the synthesis skills necessary to answer questions not previously seen, and that’s not a winning formula.

What?

The final question now becomes “What can I expect the day of the exam?” Back in 2020 I wrote about the online experience, so if you chose that option I’d encourage you to read through it; everything there still applies. The in-person option is a pretty standard thing; you sit in a room with a bunch of other people taking tests at standalone workstations, with a person monitoring the group.

I’ve done both, and mildly prefer the online choice, but I have some privileges that make it easier (e.g. a quiet space I can have to myself, a personal laptop, reliable Internet). There’s no cost difference, so do what’s right for you.

In either case, standard testing best practices apply. Get a good night’s sleep, get enough to eat beforehand (food and drink are prohibited), and plan some downtime both before and after the exam, because your brain will be tired (some of these exams can last up to 3 hours). Speaking of, absolutely don’t forget to go to the bathroom right before the test. Your mileage may vary about whether an in-person proctor will let you step out to use the restroom, but it’s forbidden when taking the test online.

It used to be that you got your results immediately after finishing the exam, but nowadays there’s some anti-fraud analysis that’s done, and you’ll get an email the next day. If you passed, congratulations! On to the next exam. And if not, no harm no foul; take a couple weeks to redouble your study efforts, and register again.

No matter what happens, I hope you take joy in learning about some of the world’s most powerful technology. If you do, thank the good folks on the AWS Training & Certification team for all the work they’ve put into developing many of the resources I’ve shared here. I certainly am grateful.

Wants What It Wants

Wants What It Wants

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(I seem to open a lot of blog posts with variations on “I’ve written before about X.” Here’s another one).

Back in 2017 I wrote three posts in a row about the tension between giving users what they want and guiding them to what is best. They came to mind this week when I ran up against on of terraform‘s more annoying (lack of) features: the inability to apply changes on a per file basis. I absolutely understand why it’s not supported, but sometimes it’s a quick and dirty way to keep moving forward, and dang it, I needed it!

After a day of annoyingly overspecifying --target flags in my commands, I rolled up my sleeves and built a wrapping script that would do the work for me, essentially adding a --file flag to the CLI. I share it here as a service to the Infrastructure-as-Code community. Usage is easy:

terraform-files apply --file my-infra.tf

It’s hacky as heck, so use at your own risk, your mileage may vary, etc etc. And if you want to make it better, revisions welcomed!

A Matter of Perspective

A Matter of Perspective

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In the past several months I’ve been making efforts to do more networking with technologists. One avenue to do that has been joining a couple Slack workspaces (Rands Leadership and All Tech Is Human, specifically). A few days back a conversation topic was the difference between unit tests and integration tests; a topic on which I definitely have opinions.

As part of the discussion I came up with the following distinction, which I liked enough to codify here for posterity:

  • Unit Test: Tests one “thing” (function, module, service, system) in isolation
  • Integration Test: Tests multiple “things” (functions, modules, services, systems) in combination

Inherent to this definition is some ambiguity, because a single “thing” at one level is multiple “things” at another level. What matters definitionally is the spirit of a test: is it trying to test one thing or multiple things. If the former, it’s a unit test. Otherwise it’s an integration test.

For what it’s worth, I’m a much bigger fan of the test diamond than the test pyramid. The ratio of “amount of stuff tested” to “effort required to write tests” is so much higher when writing integration tests. And they (typically) test at the “actual business functionality” level, vs at the “does this code do the thing” level. And value is all that matters.

On a tangential note, I developed another type of test diamond a couple years back. It was initially designed when evaluating taco shops along Poway Road in San Diego, but it’s applicable to just about anything you want to rate. I leave the interpretation of the diagram as an exercise for the reader (the ambiguity is a feature, not a bug).

Can’t Fight This Feeling

Can’t Fight This Feeling

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Yesterday I closed the book on my job with Amazon Web Services. It was a truly great gig; I was able to help numerous public sector customers advance their missions, grow both my technical and business skills, and work with some great people. But on Monday I start a new adventure as the Chief Technology Officer of Research Improving People’s Lives.

Officially, “RIPL is a tech-for-social-impact nonprofit that works with governments to help them use data, science, and technology to improve policy and lives.” But if you want a better sense of what I’ll be up to, these two opinion pieces by my colleagues are a great place to start:

I’ll have a lot more to say in the coming days about what led me to a new role, the emotions involved in transitioning from a job you love, and how to end your time at a company well. But since the cat’s out of the bag given my updated LinkedIn page, I wanted to get an announcement made here also.

Get In The Arena

Get In The Arena

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Several months ago I had a need to cache function results across multiple executions of an API client. A quick web search revealed several solutions, the best fit being cachier. However, it was still missing a few important features I needed, and thinking it was the quickest solution, I wrote up a wrapper to implement these features and published it on PyPI.

One of the features was particularly tricky to get working without modifying cachier itself. Though I did get it working, I regretted not instead simply seeing if I could build my needed capabilities into that library itself and avoiding the wrapper altogether.

Turns out I had some additional free time, and took a crack at an integrated implementation of three key features, and turns out the maintainer of cachier was grateful for the contributions. I was also able to make additional improvements, which benefit all of cachier’s users, not just the one user (i.e. me) of a wrapper which is unlikely to get popular.

This experience was a good reminder that open source software is not built by a mysterious group of “other people” but by ordinary folks who graciously offer their limited time for the public good. Considering how much I’ve benefited from such generosity throughout my career, I’ve been thinking about what responsibility I have to the broader community. I’m not the only one. Do I have a professional obligation, or even a moral one, to contribute? Quite possibly, but either way, it’s something I’m going to do as long as I’m able.

On The Turning Away

On The Turning Away

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I write this blog post sitting in my favorite coffee shop having begun yesterday a nearly three week micro-sabbatical. Not since I was laid off in early 2019 have I taken more than a few days of time off that didn’t involve travel or other busy-ness. I’m looking forward to spending some time relaxing, some time away from technology, and some time purposefully pursuing activities I haven’t had time to otherwise accomplish.

What sorts of activities? Well, for one I want to publish a new CDK construct, which I’ll talk about here once it’s published. Another is recording a podcast, which I’m happy to announce now has a brief trailer. Mostly it’s going to be similar to material covered on this blog, but perhaps with some conversations also. I’ve no idea if I’ll be able to keep it up, but I’m starting nonetheless.

I’ll also be reading quite a bit. Finished a book this morning, and started a second, the appropriately titled How To Do Nothing.

Finally, I’ll be drinking copious flat whites with the above view from my corner table. Life is good.

A Helpful Transmogrifier

A Helpful Transmogrifier

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Have a large CSV file and want a quick way to query it? Consider transforming it into a SQLite database. It’s easy! One command will do it:

$ sqlite3 "$sqlite_filename" ".import $csv_filename $table_name --csv"

Here’s a concrete example using airtravel.csv:

$ sqlite3 air.db ".import airtravel.csv air --csv"
$ sqlite3 air.db "SELECT * FROM air WHERE air.Month = 'JAN'"
JAN|  340|  360|  417

Neato! Admittedly the handling of headers and column names isn’t great, but that can be solved with a bit more script-fu (which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader).

That Last 20%

That Last 20%

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I got an email this morning from a reader who asked if I had an email subscription feature on this blog. I didn’t then, but now I do! Want my writing to hit your inbox the moment I publish? Just add your email address into the widget at the top of the sidebar and hit subscribe. Easy!

You know what wasn’t easy? Trying to get that widget to match the rest of the site. At first it looked like this:

Gross. Luckily WordPress supports adding custom CSS. Unluckily, that means I had to fiddle with CSS, which is a special form of hell. I couldn’t get it perfect on all browsers, but it’s not bad now:

While I was at it, I made a few other visual tweaks to the site, primarily shrinking the masthead height, which has always bugged me. Here’s the final code snippet. Not the prettiest, especially with all those !important keywords (generally they’re a smell that your CSS is too complex), but it gets the job done.

.navbar {
    display: none;
}

.site-header {
    height: 300px;
    min-height: 300px;
}

.site-title::after {
    margin-top: 0.5em !important;
    margin: auto;
}

button.wp-block-button__link {
    height: 34px !important;
    margin-left: 0px !important;
    padding: 0px 5px !important;
    background: #fab526;
    font-weight: bold;
}

input#subscribe-field-1 {
    padding: 5px !important;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #ddd !important;
}

.search-field::placeholder {
    color: #B9B9B9;
}

If you happen to notice any weirdness on your device/browser of choice, do let me know, eh?

Progress Report

Progress Report

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At the beginning of this year I made two resolutions:

  1. Post on this blog at least once per month
  2. Learn a new programming language

For the first one, so far so good. For the second, not so much. I read a book on Clojure, but haven’t yet had a reason to use it beyond tutorial exercises, so can’t really say I’ve learned it. Maybe it’s just that these days I’m thinking more about systems than software, and thus language choices seem less important?

Speaking of book reading, though, I’m well on my way to achieving my meta resolution (to read the same number of books as my age, every year, for the rest of my life). According to Goodreads I’ve completed 39 books so far against a goal of 43 (seven books ahead of schedule). Should be no problem to get to the finish line and beyond.

Here are the five star highlights:

Honorable mention goes to Range, which I can’t recommend enough for anyone who feels like they’ve missed out on their calling by meandering through a number of life experiences. Generalists make the best leaders and problem solvers, so embrace the variety of perspectives you can bring to the table. Real life is not like golf or chess or programming only in assembly.