More Live Practice with Restream
I’m still nervous but I’m sure this will get easier if I keep practicing. Wish me luck, y’all.
I’m still nervous but I’m sure this will get easier if I keep practicing. Wish me luck, y’all.
It is absolutely going to be a thing starting today. I had a goal to go live a few minutes. I did that and I exceeded the goal time. Next time, I’ll be prepared with at least a talking point. The goal today was just to get it done.
Getting started can be difficult. The state between the initial excitement of learning something new and when things start to click into place can be hard to move through. I’m proud to say that I’ve started and I’m moving forward in my study practice.
I’m still wobbly and uncomfortable but I know that’s part of the process. I trust that learning is still happening here 😀.
This is the first post in the #NikemaLearns DevOps blog series. Click here to see the announcement post.
As a reminder, I am working towards building proficiency in cloud computing fundamentals and AWS services so that I can confidently attempt the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam.
Why am I doing this? Because having a high-level understanding of the cloud will help me to be more effective in my role at Armory. I am also intentionally learning in public to show that there is a doable path from beginner to certified.
Organizing my study practice and thinking through how I’ll document it turned out to be time-consuming and challenging tasks. I’ve figured out enough to get started and know what I’ll do next but I am allowing myself the flexibility to change plans as needed.
I’m glad that I took the advice to go with a structured and well-defined learning objective. It’s easy for me to get into the weeds “getting ready” to work. I think having a path laid out for me cut down on some of the time it takes for me to start.
Here’s the study plan as it stands today:
I started and that’s a win that I have to acknowledge. I planned to take the practice test first and that’s what I did. I scored 50.77%; 70% is the minimum passing score.
Taking the test was helpful because it made it clear that I would have to cover many of the core services for the first time. It was also validating because I’ve been slowly introducing myself to DevOps and cloud concepts and some things are starting to stick.
For example, I’m starting to feel like I know parts of the value proposition of cloud computing. I’ve had repeated exposure to the concepts of immutable infrastructure and the benefits of automation and scalability. I’m understanding more of the “what”s and “why”s of DevOps.
After I took the practice exam, I started the video course. I’m currently on lesson five out of nine total lessons. I watch the videos and take notes as I go with my Remarkable2 tablet.
So far these are the lessons and modules I’ve completed and the one in progress:
I plan to be finished with my first run of the video course before the next blog post is due. According to the plan, the next steps will be to retake the practice test and start entering my typed notes on GitHub.
I’m happy with my progress and I am having more of those moments when things start to click. As a person who enjoys learning, I live for the “clicks.” Now that my note-taking process is planned out, I think putting it all together will start to be fun and gratifying.
We’ll see, I’ll check back in a few weeks!
I am geeked out about learning! I get enjoyment out of adding to my knowledge and pushing at the edges of my comfort zone. While continuous learning is important to me, It’s easy to fall out of practice when work and family time demand a lot of my attention.
Part of what excited me about joining the Armory crew was the culture that promotes a growth mindset, experimentation, and psychological safety. One of our employee perks is an educational budget that we can use for professional development.
Since Armory is offering to invest in my education, I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity to level up my skills and learn on the job. I see value in documenting my learning in public, and that’s what I’m announcing today.
My hope is that my fellow technologists (especially developers) who are new to DevOps will see me wobbling about on my training wheels and feel encouraged to learn more about this field for themselves.
I started out making webpages on our family computer as a kid and tech has been part of my life ever since. What I love about our industry is that there’s always more to learn, there’s always the next level.
As I discover more about myself and my aptitude, it has been a fun challenge to see which areas of tech align the most with my natural abilities and interests. I have the most exposure to programming (in a variety of languages) and front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I’ve dipped my toe in lots of things; I’m not an expert in any of them. I consider myself a language-agnostic generalist.
My relative inexperience with cloud computing and DevOps triggered my insecurities in my early days at Armory. I accept that It’s normal and natural to be wobbly when taking on something new. Starting in a new role and feeling like everything is new is nerve-wracking. It took me a minute, but I’ve started to settle in to remember who I am.
I trust myself enough to know that I can learn new things and I can do hard things. After investing a few hours into getting up to speed in this new domain, I realize that I’m coming in with more than a blank slate. I have peripheral knowledge and experience.
My pre-training self-assessment is that I’m an advanced-beginner. I’m solidly in noob territory but I know a couple of things.
My first milestone objective is to earn the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. I chose this certification for several reasons:
I have access to O’Reilly study materials and the online learning platform provided by AWS. My first step will be to take the practice exams. In my next post, I’ll have a more defined study plan and a projected testing date.
Every other Friday I’ll publish a blog reflecting on what I learned and what I did in the preceding weeks. I haven’t decided on the exact format for these posts yet, but I’m aiming for the standard of “really good notes” as defined by Joel Hooks.
I’m excited to get back into focused and structured learning. Not only will I learn the foundations of the AWS cloud, but I’ll also get to practice what mentor-in-my-head Angie Jones calls “working out loud.”
Hmm, I more look at what I do as “working out loud” vs marketing.
— Angie Jones (@techgirl1908) June 17, 2020
It’s life changing. Opportunities flood in daily – for jobs, talks, writing, etc. Even from the top of the top companies. To even be on their radar is wild to me. #DevDiscuss https://t.co/oKaGwXm7p7
I aspire to be a developer advocate and building a public body of work is how I intend to prove I’m capable of that role.
If you want to follow my learning journey on social media, I’ll be using the hashtag #NikemaLearns to talk about it with links to each blog post.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic played a part in reducing the access gap for parents (with caregiving responsibilities), disabled people, and neurodivergent people in tech. I’m a member of each of those marginalized groups, plus some.
Tech’s quick transition to remote work for all created a sliver of an opening in a door I’ve been knocking on for years.
Landing your first full-time tech role is not a trivial task. Some of us have more barriers than others to overcome. It doesn’t make intuitive sense, but the timing of the pandemic was beneficial to my job search. I was helped by the more inclusive hiring and work practices that companies adopted as a matter of survival.
When it became clear in early 2020 that it was no longer safe to work in close physical proximity, companies made the right decision to close offices and have their people work from home. Co-located teams that weren’t prepared for this shift had to get it together without the luxury of time to optimize the experience.
Companies kept hiring through the crisis. Because everyone who could went home, more junior employees and new hires joined the distributed workforce. It wasn’t exceptional anymore, it was table stakes.
I come from what tech culture is calling a “non-traditional” background. I’m a Black single-mother in my late 30s. I don’t have a degree at all and my primary job for the last 13 years has been “stay-at-home mom.” Those traits alone were enough to make me a lot different than the most sought-after job candidates, and the attributes I listed are just the broad categories of marginalized groups I belong to.
With a closer look, you could see that I was low-income, financially strained, and suffering the effects of untreated health conditions and undiagnosed ADHD. I was homeschooling my two school-aged children. As a single parent, that meant they would be a constant presence in my home, the same home I was hoping to make my workplace.
I didn’t show up at tech’s door empty-handed. I have been programming and building web pages for decades. I went to school, earned college credits and a certificate in Web Development in the early 2010s. In the most recent years, I learned modern web development as a self-directed learner (with some time in a coding school) and built communities with my peers who were also on a path to their first tech roles.
I never considered working a tech role from an office, not even 13 years ago when I started my certificate program. Remote work was the only option. I was confident that I could thrive while working from home. I even had practical experience as a developer on a distributed team thanks to The Collab Lab.
Finding a remote-friendly role for my first tech job was difficult. The positions that I qualified for were few and far between. Tech culture seemed to be telling me that this mode of working was a perk reserved for current employees and more senior candidates.
The pandemic helped my job search situation by giving everyone a taste of the challenges I’ve been living with and working around for years.
Social expectations had to shift. We were all doing our best to navigate a deadly, airborne virus. This meant mass trauma. Knowledge workers rushed home before everyone knew exactly how that was supposed to work. Schools closed and parents had double-duty as employees and homeschooling teachers. We were all humans going through a difficult time – all of us in the same storm.
Pre-COVID, those were my exact conditions (except for the deadly virus part). Before the pandemic, I was enduring a personal storm while the weather was fine for others with the same aspirations I had.
I can’t imagine that hiring managers came across many people like me or in similar situations to mine. Not only was I a “non-traditional” candidate, but I also had conditions and challenges. Multiple people would have to look past those challenges with empathy and really want to give me a chance. I wasn’t an easy candidate to say yes to.
In a world where remote work wasn’t table stakes, I could be singled out as a person who was needier than most. Remember, it was remote or nothing for me. COVID changed that making me one of many with common needs.
We all experienced the pandemic at once. To use the storm analogy, some were better equipped to weather the storm than others, but we were all in it. We were dealing with sickness, death, trauma, and fear. People needed grace and understanding from one another. It’s easier to offer that to others when you have first-hand experience to draw from.
This climate provided the opportunity I needed. I was not okay and I was getting desperate. I needed the grace and accommodation that was suddenly and necessarily afforded to everyone. Nothing being normal made my abnormalities less prominent.
I had a better chance of being seen for what I had to offer without my mess of a life blocking the view. Pandemic life is hard and messy for everyone. This was another opportunity for my, usually abnormal, normal to blend into the crowd. I was used to having kids around while I worked, wearing many hats, showing emotional sensitivity, and spending most of my time at home. For years, that was my life entirely.
I hope weathering the storm together turns up the empathy dial in our tech culture. It took a pandemic for me to have the slightest chance to start my career.
Even if that’s just my perception of reality, that’s unacceptable, isn’t it? Consider what I must have gone through to come to that conclusion. While you can’t wait to get back to normal and business as usual, your normal was hell for me. Your normal erased and devalued me.
I’m here now, adding value in ways only I can. I belong in this industry, like many others who will knock on doors until their knuckles bleed, then turn away defeated, never to return. If the pandemic is what it took to open doors that were bolted shut, don’t let the doors close once our fear for our lives subsides.
Let’s learn something from this. Let’s think beyond the short term and stretch our imaginations to think of ways to improve employee experiences across tech. Let’s keep the awareness that systemic inequity means that people we need in tech have shown up to work and can’t get in.
Better yet, if you are in a position to do so, throw the door open and welcome folks in. We didn’t show up empty-handed, and we’re not asking you to lower the bar. We bring skills, experience, and diverse perspectives. Don’t make us fight and bleed for an opportunity to participate. I promise you that tech and the world that it touches will be better off for it.
Photo by Sheldon Kennedy on Unsplash