Monthly summary #3
Summer is behind us. However, I did not stay idle during the last month for sure – a lot has happened, and here’s a monthly summary of everything I have done in August.
Monthly summary
AWS
The main area of interest was still AWS Associate Dev cert – with the official course finished, I have resorted to studying cheat-sheets of all kinds. I must be frank – it exposed me to a lot of new knowledge, and I am glad that I did it. It was a beneficial coincidence, as I was mostly studying them while being away in the French Alps. The service-based chapters, were a short and concise way of doing some learning every day. 
Once I was back from France, I have started practicing with mock exams. Gosh, that was exhausting! Taking two of those almost every day for a week was a real strain, but it gave me lots of insight, and also boost in my self-confidence. I was reaching 70-80% score on the regular basics. As those tests are usually harder than the actual exam (and I can confirm it) – I was quite “zen” when the time of my exam came.
I don’t want to keep you hanging, and also repeat myself. I have passed the exam with success on the 3rd of September (which was yesterday). You may want to read a summary article I have written about it.
KCNA
After I came from my holidays, I wanted to explore the possibility of passing KCNA. It is available only as an online-proctored exam, and surprise, surprise – there were multiple spots available soon. Without thinking much I have registered for the 30th August. In order to prepare I have refreshed all my flashcards about Kubernetes, and did two remaining mock exams from James Spurin’s course. As I passed them with almost 100% result, I was pretty confident about my knowledge level.
KCNA exam went flawlessly – I think I spent more time preparing the exam area due to my proctor’s instructions, than on the exam itself. Obviously after all that, I have written a summary article about my KCNA experience.
Finishing back-to-basics for networking
At the very beginning of the month, I was also able to write and publish the remaining posts about back-to-basics networking topics. Not huge amount of work, but it is there nonetheless.
GC state in Java
In order to give myself something else than just cloud and reading, I have turned towards Java. And to be more precise – towards garbage collection. I have created a series of posts about the overall GC mechanisms on my previous blog. This time I wanted to put it in the context of the actual programming language. Therefore, I spent some time going through all the versions of Java (starting with version 8), and explaining how specific algorithms worked, and what’s their current state. Originally, the article was created to cover Java 21, but with the upcoming release of Java 23, and a small push from Artur Skowroński (the editor of JVM Weekly newsletter – check it out, it’s fabulous!), I also covered the upcoming version of Java.
What I have read?
Here we got something to talk about. Obviously, I have started the whole thing back in July, but I have continued it in August too. I am talking about “Systems Design Interview” books, which have two parts. In August I have finished reading the second one. Lots of reading, even more knowledge gained. Obviously I couldn’t prevent myself from writing a review.
The remaining books I was reading while I was on vacation. I have chosen not that technical ones, as I wanted to take some break, and give my brain some rest 😉 The one that I have started with was “Developing Apps with GPT-4 and ChatGPT”. All that hype around AI is noisy, and I needed some clear presentation of how those things work under the hood. Not that I wanted to make notes/flashcards – just to skim over. The book fulfilled my needs, and I recommend reading it. As usual – the review can be found here.
The second week of my vacation I dedicated to reading “97 things every cloud engineer should know”. It is one of the books in the series “97 things”. Already read one about Java, and it was a pleasant and refreshing read. The same thing I can say about the cloud version. The book is not technical per se, but covers various topics, presenting a wide picture of the cloud landscape. I didn’t write an actual review, but if you look for easy-to-digest book about cloud environment – don’t hesitate to give it a try.
What’s next?
That wraps-up monthly summary for August 2024. As usual, below you can find links to the specific weeks’ summaries. The plan for the upcoming month was to finish with AWS Dev cert (which already happened as mentioned above). The truth is, that in three days I am going to start my second vacation time – this time “the real one”. I plan to set a new FKT (Fastest Known Time) on the moutain trail in Poland, called GSS2 (east-bound). I already hold a record for the west-bound version, which is quite ambitious. This year the plan is not that far-streching, and I think 12 days should do the trick.
If you want to follow me, there will be a live monitoring of my location, which you can check at this address – starting from the 9th of September in the morning (Europe time of course).
For the upcoming two weeks then, my #SeniorDevRevamp is going to be put on hold. There won’t be any weekly summaries for sure. I am taking my Kindle with me, and I plan to read some books along the way. Will that work – we will see. I will be back on 23th of September. Hopefully with a new FKT, and fresh mind to accomodate all the future learning 😉 I have many things on my plate (SQL/PostgreSQL and Python leading the pack at the moment), so stay tuned!
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