The long journey of “filling the blanks”
In my 10+ years of work life I have always been busy with work. I did learn many new things of course during my time though as the years passed a growing concern began to bubble up as I conducted interviews for my team.
People had missing bits (sometimes critical) in their knowledge of important components or tech. While this does sound normal and people of course could learn, it triggered something in me. Looking in to myself I noticed the following unacceptable flaws
- When presented with a problem, I look for a solution, apply the fix thats just enough, move on to the next task promptly forgetting what I did If I didn’t document it. Thankfully I do document a lot.
- I use just enough tech for my needs because there is never time to take it up a notch. For example, we still handle configs manually.
- I have some knowledge about almost everything but if someone knows better I defer to their knowledge. I seem to forget that I also should know enough to create my own solutions. This hurts the most in logging and monitoring bits.
This just won’t do. No.
To fix this, actually test/challenge myself and also decently (covering most corners) learn the topics I brushed against, I compiled the below list of challenges for the next 2 years.
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) — done (26.04.21)
- Docker Certified Associate — done(9.05.21)
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate —for infr provisioning — done(5.06.21)
- No ansible certificate apparently but going to learn that too anyways — for conf management (UPDATE: So there’s a certification for ansible merged in to RHSE but I first have to take RHSA. While I do enjoy hands on exams both are 450$. Lol, no.). Well I’m through with the first pass (19.06.21), next should take a week or 2.
Edit (26.11.21): So life happened, new job after 12.10.21, lots of changes so the list changed.
- Going wide on Go: finished finally (26.11.21).
- HCE stack, basically
- Vault Associate,
- A long look at Vault (10.02.22)
- Nomad
- Consul
- Open Telemetry
And then I need to get through these
- Prometheus/Grafana — for infr monitoring
- Jaeger/New Relic for app monitoring
- Terratest and Terragrunt to fill the missing bits in Terraform
- Helm
- Rancher
- Process google sre guide mentally and write a medium story: https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
- Flux/ConfigServer to push config changes to cluster
- kubediff to detect drifts
- Proficiency with ELK & Zipkin maybe Splunk
- İstio— for service mesh
- Learning details of Reverse/Fw Proxy, Caching Server & Load Balancers
- Kafka, kafka shovel
- Graphql -apollo
- LFCS or A Red Hat® Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
- Back to basics with VMware Spring Professional 2021
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional
- Something new: PCAP — Certified Associate in Python Programming certification
- And then get Django out of the way
- Maybe Kotlin
- And then Maybe CKA, and CKS or my dream suffering OCSP
- Bit deeper in K8s (HPA, GKE, VPA, Pod Security, CRD, Node Hardening, Self Managed)
