Fifteen years ago I decided to leave the IT field and become a Primary School teacher. Now, I'm trying to return to the IT field. So far it hasn't come without it's challenges.
Why would I want to change career?
- COVID changed things for many people and I'm one of them. I want the flexibility of eventually being able to work remotely.
- I want my pay to increase with my skill-level. If you are familiar with the teaching profession, this only happens up to a certain point. And if you are doing supply teaching, the daily rate is laughable.
- I feel with my passion for IT, and historical background in software development, I have much potential once I'm up to speed with the cloud.
- I'm used to problem-solving (see below).
- I'm used to dealing with people every day - DevOps seems a lot about working with people and getting them onboard.
Examples of Problem-Solving
With IT
Even 15 years ago, I regularly had to resolve intermittent PC problems had to systemically ruling out one thing at a time until discovering the piece of hardware causing the problem.
In the classroom
In the classroom, there is still the need to problem-solve especially when special needs are involved.
For example, child A is distracting a number of children in the class who are more easily distracted. Child A has special needs, is chewing his tie despite having a fiddle toy to keep him busy while the class is doing whole-class reading together. A few children get stressed because of what Child A is doing while we are trying to read together. I reflect on what happened and decide to change the layout of the room so that all child will see the back of Child A. After informal discussion with the distracted children, I also come to understand that some children are annoyed by the tiny-clicks from the fiddle toy. I talk to Child A's teacher from last year and find out what fiddle toy Child A was using. I then choose a similar fiddle toy which is dead silent.
The next time the class is doing whole-class reading together, a few children are still distracted because Child A starts chewing his tie again and turning around in his chair. I speak to Child A about why he is chewing his tie again (after having stopped for weeks). He says he is 'bored', so I understand that he is not always able to follow the story that is engaging and the right level for the rest of the class. I prepare other activities e.g. drawing, to keep him from chewing his tie while the rest of the class reads together.
Keeping my toe dipped in the IT waters
With my enthusiasm for IT, I have had some personal IT projects over the years while being a teacher.
One of them involved more than a year's development time. I only had the evenings to work on it while I taught kids in the classroom during the day, so it took a while. I made an ASP.NET website written in C# with an SQL Server database on the backend. I had done something similar about a decade before as a waterfall-development-style final project for my university degree, but back then I had developed it in Visual Basic and ASP pages. Also, this newer project was secured with login/password and 5 levels of access based on the type of user, and also a wider range of user-interface design and larger number of pages/functions. It was very helpful that I worked as developer while my main end-user was doing some of the testing. He is dyslexic so, continual feedback from him enabled me to think in terms of simple intuitive design.
The challenges of changing back to IT
It's been a confusing journey already - I didn't know what to study to break back into the IT field. First, I studied Machine Learning through a Stanford University course. It was incredible to understand the algorithms and - through much perseverance - get them working through a language called MatLab.
I then felt I needed to understand more of data science in general, so I completed IBM's Data Science certificate. My final project used machine learning in Python to answer the question: "What is the best neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia for families with children?" (view the final PowerPoint presentation).
Following this, I completed my own project to create a website (www.unlockthesky.com) to explain what was happening with flights to Australia during COVID. For this, I had to write Python scripts to collect data from a range of sources, including multiple APIs and from web scraping, then combine and clean the data. I then used Tableau to visualise the data. Following this, I designed a Wordpress website where I posted articles with embedded Tableau charts (note: I did not create a version formatted for mobile devices).
Once again, I was confused about what to do next. I enrolled in a boot camp to learn DevOps and gained the Cisco DevNet Associate badge.
I embarked on the "The Cloud Resume Project" designed by Forrest Brazeal. Since I also had to work and needed to complete most of it after hours, it took me about a month to complete. I decided I wanted to use Azure as cloud provider for the project. Please find my CI/CD-pipeline-deployed resume at at www.rayrossi.net. You can also visit my learning log for the Cloud Resume Project.
A couple of days ago, I passed my Azure Fundamentals exam (pass mark is 700, I scored of 925).
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