MinaWell well well... it's been a minute hasn't it? How time flies when you're having fun, and learning more about tech than you ever have in your life!
Last I left off (9 months ago already???) I had just gotten my AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, I completed the resume challenge and I wanted to dive into Infrastructure as Code (IAC if you remember). Well, let's just say not everything always goes as planned, and when you try to learn one thing it becomes apparent that you need to learn three more things first.
So let me transport you back to February 2024, I got my new cert and was feeling good! I had an internship lined up and was SO excited to start it, sadly things don't always go my way - and the program got cancelled. That one hit hard I'm not going to lie, but what else is there to do but get back up and keep going. I soon discovered that trying to get an entry level job with no formal experience and just my CP cert wasn't going to cut it, and that "entry-level" ACTUALLY means have 10 years of experience, a masters degree and OH you'd make more money working at McDonalds (I could write a whole blog post about the ridiculousness of the job market at the moment but I digress). So with the odds against me I set out to work on my own projects, not only to help me learn more about AWS and DevOps but also to be able to demonstrate that I know how to use the resources.
Now the question became what exactly should I make? I could find guides on how to set up static websites but I had already done that. I could keep launching EC2 instances and attaching EBS volumes to them, but then doing nothing with them - boring. No, I needed a project that I cared about and WANTED to create. Something that would actually give me a reason to want to dive in.
Enter : GAMING
At the time me, my friends and even family were obsessed with a new game that had come out. The totally original, definitely not copyright infringing Palworld. Palworld uses servers that the players either get provisioned from the game itself, or servers that you can build yourself and host the game on directly - can you guess where this is going? I could totally build a Palworld server for us!
Now actually creating the server was easy peasy, set up an EC2 instance, download and set up the GSM and BOOM BAM we got ourselves a server. (I'm gonna go ahead and skip the hours of trouble shooting I went through, let's all choose to believe it deployed flawlessly the first time ok?) The server had been born and I even set it up so it had a password, but that wasn't good enough for me.
What's the point of having a server that multiple people can play on if I have to constantly turn it on and off whenever people want to jump in? It's a pain for them, and annoying for me so my next mission was figuring out how to allow others to turn the server on - without access to my AWS account. After doing some research I came to the conclusion that a Discord bot would work best (if you're a gamer you know what Discord is, if you aren't... think of Slack but built for gamers and communities). I could have the bot be set up to invoke a Lambda function which would turn the instance on or off based on whatever command someone input into the chat, and also have the bot return the status of the instance and the instance ID. Getting the ID was easy enough, but once I tried to get the bot to actually turn the instance ON I discovered APIs. Now I knew what an API was of course, but not how they really worked - this is when I found out that I would need to learn
DUN DUN DUN....
PYTHON.
For the next two months I took Python courses and did small practice projects, at the end I earned a Google Python certification (Yaaaay cert #2 is in the bag!). Am I a master of Python now? Far from it, but I at least know the basics and can more easily understand code snippets that I can use to glue some code together - thank you StackOverflow.
Throughout this time I was of course also applying for jobs, doing interviews and trying to get myself out there. Finally in May, right after finishing up my Python learning I got the opportunity to join an associate program at Hanabyte! Now you may think "Oh this program will be revolving Python, right?" WRONG - they specialize in Cybersecurity, a part of cloud engineering that I had barely dipped my toes in outside of S3 bucket policies and security groups. So here we go on yet another adventure of learning something I knew nothing about.
The program started out STRONG, I had an amazing human appointed as my mentor - Simon Abisoye. He immediately said he had a few goals for me - "By the end of the program I want you to have 3 new certifications, do a speech of some sort regarding tech, and GET YOU A JOB!!!". Let me tell you as someone who prefers to take things one step at a time this seemed like an impossible mountain to climb, but I will be forever grateful for his excitement and encouragement, I don't think I would be as far along in my journey as I am if it wasn't for you Simon! Anyway sappy stuff aside, he wanted me to start with the CompTia Security+ cert which according to their own website is recommended for people with "CompTIA Network+ and two years of experience working in a security/ systems administrator job role". I bet you can figure out how much experience I had -
Absolutely none.
So from May to July I STUDIED, as much time as I possibly could I studied for this exam. Not only was I starting from zero but the exam was also being slightly changed at the end of July and the way the questions were set up would be a bit different, so if I missed the cut off I would have to re-study on how to take the exam! On top of that this exam is OVER 400$ - YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT FOUR HUNDRED!!! Suffice it to say I had lot of pressure on me. Finally it was mid July and I was running out of time. I had watched all the videos, I had done all the practice exams, I created and memorized over 100 flash cards and I had drank a TON of coffee to get through it - it was time. I sat for the exam having a terrible migraine, the room was as hot as anything and the first question popped up. I was clueless, skip to next question, skip, skip, skip... I knew then I was going to fail this exam. Since I already knew my fate I said screw it, and answered the questions to the best of my ability. Tears in my eyes and feeling sick to my stomach an hour and a half later I hit the dreaded "End Exam" button. The fact that they make you go through a rating of their exam before getting your results is truly, TRULY cruel. I'm not going to lie I chose mostly random answers for every question since I felt so broken about failing this exam... Imagine how bad I felt when I finished the rating and the screen popped up saying "Congratulations you've passed!". Passed... I PASSED??? I felt so sick it was all I could do to open the door and lay on the cool floor and let what had just happen sink in. I really did it, I want to say I always believed in myself but let's be honest that is a bold-faced lie.
So the first step of my associate program was done, and another certification was added to the list (at the expense of a piece of my sanity of course). I really can say that I'm super proud of myself for achieving that, from no cybersecurity knowledge to passing an established and accredited exam is no small feat.
If you've gotten this far, thank you! This post is getting long and I still have many things I want to cover so I'm going to end this here and pick it up in the next part. Look forward to more adventures coming up about certs (did someone say SysOps?), presentations and projects coming up soon!
