DEV Community: Florian Clanet

Coin Backpack: thirdweb, next.js and sanity to help you with your first steps in crypto

Florian Clanet — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 08:25:29 +0000

Mid of 2021, I was trying some stuff to get a better overview of the web3 environment: understanding the main concepts, trying to take part in some projects, minting NFTs...
After a while, I switched my experimentations to the technical part: how to build some solidity contracts, building some buildspace projects, understanding how to set up a DAO...

Believe it or not, the last step (for now!) brought me the Hashnode Hackathon!

I read the article mostly by curiosity but I found out this hackathon was the occasion to set up a real application, get a little challenge and test some capabilities of thirdweb.

At this time, I only knew thirdweb from some Twitter posts and I was really curious about how it could make the developments easier.

I started to think about an interesting idea and I got some about NFTs, DAO...
I finally choose to build an opensource Coinbase-like prototype...

A few days after I started to develop a first draft on my spare time, this idea moved to building an open source educational project to help newcomers get a better understanding of how to deal with crypto tokens.

The links

The project is open source, open for contributions (even if I still need to improve the repository to help newcomers to contribute) and available on GitHub:

https://github.com/Flolight/Coin-Backpack

Find the deployed application here:

https://coin-backpack.vercel.app/

The first steps

Here is a list of some key ideas I followed to build this project.

Requirements:

Coinbase-like design
Connect with Metamask wallet
Display all known tokens with their information (Name, Symbol, USD Price...)
Display current wallet detailed balanced per token
Display current wallet total balance
Display wallet total balance evolution

Next steps:

Implement the tutorial part to guide users through their first "fake" transaction
Improve documentation
Improve repository management to make it easier for people to use the project and contribute
Display NFTs linked to the wallet

The Tech stack

The project is built using Next.JS framework and currently hosted on Vercel here.

For my first time trying this stack, I must admit it was super easy to start and deploy this way!

The database part is supported by Sanity.io. Again, this is a very "easy-to-set up" solution, definitely sufficient at the current step of the project and most of all, quick to use to generate the needed requests for Coin Backpack.

I created some contracts in thirdweb to represent tokens and be able to interact with them through the thirdweb SDK. This way, my application is able to retrieve the information about tokens, transactions...
Of course, I also used the thirdweb Web3Provider to connect the user wallet.

It was really helpful not to have to develop totally from scratch the modules provided by thirdweb.
If I had a remark to push after trying their solution, it would be that the documentation could probably be improved (but I guess it will be soon) to make it easier to find some technical details, without having to go through the guide articles (which are more tutorials than reference documentation).

Beside this point, I feel like thirdweb is probably going to become one of the references about building web3 projects fast, with ease and designed the right way.

The future of the project

I'm still working on the tool in order to dive deeper into the web3 topics and to develop the educative part.
Currently, this point is, indeed, still in construction and will need some more time to be implemented and improved by users' feedbacks.

Again, if you like the project, feel free to suggest features, create issues or fork/send pull requests to the repository.

Conclusion

Thank you Hashnode team for setting this hackathon up, this was the trigger I needed to get started!

I have to admit that thirdweb help was really appreciated to simplify the development process and to abstract some highly technical operations.

I still need to spend some additional time testing more in details the NFTs related capabilities, but from what I read in the guides, it should be quite as easy to set up as the modules I already used.

I look forward using the other thirdweb capabilities in Coin Backpack or any other web3 projects in the future.

Feel free to reach me on Twitter FlolightC to share your thoughts about Coin Backpack project or to ask me questions ! I’m always happy to discuss with you!

For reference, here are some resources I used to develop this project:

How I passed the AWS Machine Learning Specialty certification

Florian Clanet — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 10:18:01 +0000

How the hell did I end up in the exam room?

Two years ago, machine learning meant nothing to me and Artificial Intelligence was just some hyped word with disparate college memories.

However, my interest was growing as I was reading more and more interesting articles on these topics.
One day I found out AWS was releasing a small course on Coursera about Machine Learning: Getting started with AWS Machine Learning.

I watched the videos, enjoyed the examples and passed the Quizz. I needed more material, my curiosity was growing and I wanted to practise, diving into the machine learning ocean and discover how interesting the fishing could be!

Some days later, I enrolled into the Standford ML course by Andrew Ng where I learned so much about theory but also some examples and practical use cases: everything to be able to be autonomous in my future learnings.

At that point, I started to think about going after the AWS Machine Learning Specialty exam.
Following the same principle as for my Architect certification, I wanted to use the "exam goal" to explore even more about machine learning, the tools and the best practices used in the professional environment.

And here I am, a few months later, babbling about this exciting experience!
I want to share part of this feeling with you, describing my own journey and hoping for you to enjoy it as much as I did!

What's on the menu?

Photo by Jessie McCall on Unsplash

The first thing to do when starting such a journey is to find a map. You wouldn't go to the Amazon forest without one, right?

In your case, you want to go to the Machine Learning Specialty page and check in particular the exam guide.
This simple page will help you understand how the evaluation is performed and what are the needed skills.

Let's hear the master voice:

The exam validates a candidate’s ability to design, build, deploy, optimize, train, tune, and maintain ML solutions for given business problems by using the AWS Cloud.

Now, the practical way!
In November 2021, the assessed skills were spread like the following:

20% - Data Engineering

This domain includes everything related to data ingestion, transformation and storage.
Data is your main asset in this journey, you want to treat it well and build a nice and genuine friendship!

Some services/topics you should explore: Glue, Kinesis, S3, Spark...

24% - Exploratory Data Analysis

Here we are talking about data preparation for modelling, feature engineering and data analysis (understand and visualize).
This is the part where your AWS skills are not going to help you a lot and where you should develop your data-science and analytics knowledge. Improve your relation with data by adding some analytics friends and you should be good!

Explore some notions like: data cleansing methods, feature reduction, learn to choose visualizations...

36% - Modelling

This domain will check your abilities to transform a business problem into a machine learning one (or not if it is not needed!).
You will need to learn how to choose the proper model, how to train it, how to optimize hyperparameters, and of course, how to evaluate the performance of your model.
This is a very important part of the exam and it covers a broad range of topics.
To carry on with our metaphor, this is the moment you ask your data some context, some help to be able to provide the best means of transport to the target destination...

You should definitely get some real-world experience (projects or use cases examples) to help you analyse the situations and take the right decision.

20% - Machine Learning Implementations and Operations

We know how to get and store the data, prepare and analyse it and choose the right method to use for the use case. Nice!
But how will you actually build your solution in order to provide and optimize the business value?

This last domain is focused on choosing the right services to provide the right amount of performance, availability, scalability, resilience and fault tolerance.
It includes also the strategies to deploy the model in production and a bunch of security best practices.

Time to have fun ! You did everything right until now, it's time to show that you know how to make use of all this work.

This is almost the end of the road: deploy the model to production, monitor it, adapt it, maintain it. Make it work!

Good program isn't it?!

Anyway, considering the large perimeter of the exam, remember that in order to pass, you will need to have a good knowledge and experience about machine learning but also about AWS services.
On the other hand, don't be scared, the journey is at least as enjoyable as the congrats email when you pass and you will soon be able to navigate between all the AWS ML services.

For more practical information before we really start the journey, the exam is 180 minutes long and will cost you 300USD.

That said, let's see now how you can organize your learning.

Sagemaker my love 🥰

Before talking about my recent love story (is it a bit early for that?!), I would say that a good start for this certification is the AWS Machine Learning path.

Weither you are an beginner or the absolute expert, it will give you a large overview of the exam and will build the needed foundations to organize your learning depending on your strengths and weaknesses.

Now, let's come back to my (and probably your) future true love during this journey:
Amazon Sagemaker!

A proud wizard once told me:

Read the Sagemaker documentation... a lot! ~ A proud wizard, once.

This should clearly become your main source of truth.
Start by... the getting started! Navigate through the sections and take notes!

Learn all about the built-in algorithms and the way you can fine-tune them using hyperparameters.
How to choose and set the objectives? Which data source can be plugged? What is the best way to deploy? How to secure Sagemaker notebooks...

The list of question to clarify is very large at the beginning but don't feel overwhelmed. Just start somewhere and the rest will follow.

Courses

Beside the official documentation, you will want to follow a specific course to guide you through the exam. Here are some I found interesting during my learning.

I used them as a starting point from which I could easily explore in detail the complex notions I didn't get at first sight.

Some videos to watch

AWS Power Hour Machine Learning serie

This is your call to get some more real-life use cases.
As it can be hard to tackle every topic of the exam on your daily job or side projects, this is the way to get some experience from real projects (isn't transfer learning one of the topic to master?!).
Here is a sample of what you'll be able to learn in the AWS Power Hour Machine Learning serie:

Textract
Comprehend
CodeGuru
Kendra
Personalize
...

re:Invent sessions

This is true for one and every AWS certification but re:Invent sessions can be very informative to dive into some specific AWS tools and I particular Sagemaker capabilities.

Here are some sessions I found useful:

Julien Simon's Book

I could not close this article without talking about the great book Learn Amazon SageMaker by Julien Simon.
It guides you through the full Amazon Sagemaker process by providing some implementation examples and challenges. It covers every aspect of a professional machine learning project and elaborate about good practices and tips to help you navigate when moving your models to the next level, to the production environments.

Definitely a must read for this exam and for your next challenges in professional environments!

Finishing straight: readiness and the practise tests

Here you are, with all this courses and videos in your head. You did some hands-on labs and you learned about some real world use cases.
But I know you don't feel so confident yet... And that's normal!

AWS exam readiness course will help you identify some of the remaining topics you need to deepen.
It gives an overview of all topics for the exam without taking to much time... worth it!

Next step is for sure to check the available practise tests. They are even more important for this exam than for other certifications: you need to learn how to read, understand and tackle the questions.
You will face long and complex question during more or less 3 hours, you better feel prepared and used to the format!

There are really very few of quick questions you could find at the associate level.
Most of the questions are in fact some real life use cases with 5 to 15 lines to read before even looking at the questions. This needs a little bit of training to stay focused and know what information to extract from the question.

To complete your learning material, I also found these resources useful:

Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash

The exam is a little marathon not a sprint

Now you are almost ready. Let's take some time to reflect on the exam itself and how to think about it to get the best chances.

Before the exam, try to get a good night sleep and relax as much as you can. The exam is going to last 3 hours and you don't want to feel overwhelmed right after the beginning!

During the exam, take the time to read question and create a virtual representation of the problem in your head. This is the key to make sure you understood the problem well enough to think about a solution.

A lot of questions will propose you several valid answers, you'll need to take note of all critical requirements (cost, simplicity, efficiency, liability, real-time...) to find the best answers.
Don't panic if you feel like some questions are really hard to answer: sometimes AWS team include some slightly out of scope questions to explore future question ideas or to assess the common knowledge about some recently launched services. These questions won't be part of your rating but you will not know which ones they are.

Ok, I almost forgot the last task before the exam: you need to schedule the exam with Pearson Vue or PSI, on-site or from home, select your preferred language... This won't be the hardest part of the journey but don't be afraid to book your exam and set a deadline for your last learning sessions. You will never be ready if you listen to yourself!

Just go for it!

Conclusion

Is it already time to conclude? Hum... so what can we say?

This one is hard. Hard but not impossible!

I learned a lot in the process and I would definitely recommand to pursue this certification path if you are interested in machine learning.
It will give you some practise and material to deepen your knowledge (even if you don't want to take the exam).

With a good dose of preparation, you will get the possibility to become officially part of the AWS ML family and to get opportunities in one of the most demanded field of at least the 5 next years!
Isn't this interesting?

This exam is also really complete and will ask you to practice and learn about real uses cases. You are not protected from having some fun along the way, during your learning...
As always, I hope I managed to share some of my feelings with you and that you are ready to start this awesome learning journey.

I wish you good luck!

Feel free to reach me on Twitter FlolightC to keep me updated about your AWS machine learning journey or to ask me questions ! I’m always happy to discuss with you!

How I passed my AZ-900 (nov-2020) Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification

Florian Clanet — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 22:06:26 +0000

The best way to start your Cloud journey in Azure

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Do you want to learn what Cloud is ?

Or maybe you already have an idea but you would like to get better and be able to showcase your knowledge.

Microsoft AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification path is a perfect start.

After exploring a lot AWS Services, I felt the need to have a better understanding of other Cloud providers. This certification is interesting to have a first overview of the Microsoft Azure services. You will learn the basic Cloud principles as well as how you can find them in Azure.

In this article, I will help you understand how to pass the AZ-900 certification and some of the benefits to do so. I will talk about the new version released in November 2020.

Ready to dive into Azure stuff ? Follow me !

What is AZ-900 ?

The AZ-900 certification is the first level certification issued by Microsoft about its Azure cloud services.

If you have a look at the Microsoft Azure certification path compiled by Wizlabs (2020), you can see that AZ-900 is at the beginning of each road.

Microsoft Azure certification path by Whizlabs (2020)

The goal of this certification is to give you foundational knowledge of Cloud concepts and how Azure is implementing them into several services.

You don’t need any Cloud background to start learning and pass the exam. However a previous IT experience will make it easier and faster to achieve.

The skills

Here are the skills you need to learn about to pass the exam. I won’t just copy paste every requirement but I will give you an idea of what’s inside. You can find the details of every skill on the AZ-900 exam page.

Cloud concepts (20–25%)

Here we are talking about Cloud general concepts. You will learn about the benefits (CapEx vs OpEx…), the “y” drivers (High Availability, Elasticity, Scalability…). There is also some content about the different service levels (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).

Be sure to well understand this section as it will be useful for every other certification you will take as well as for real-life situations.

Core Azure Services (15-20%)

In this section you should know the main Azure services. Like the one you will use every day as Azure technical people. You will discover the resources you can use as well as the patterns to manage them using Azure core architectural components (Regions, Availability Zones, Subscriptions, Management groups…).

This is about the shell of your future Azure architectures.

Solution and management tools in Azure (10–15%)

DevOps, monitoring, IoT, Data analytics, portal and shell…

If you think that they are very different topics, you are probably right !

This section is about the presentation of solutions to real-life problems, available through Azure services and how to manage them. I’m sure you will find here some tools that you are looking forward to use on your next Azure project.

General security and network security features (10–15%)

Because you know it (and if not, you NEED to learn it) security is of paramount importance in IT. And especially when you are using public cloud platforms.

You will find in this topic some details about how you can prevent security breaches using Azure network security features. Moreover, take time to have a deep look into the several compliance, alerting and prevention services (Sentinel, Security Center, KeyVault…).

Enjoy the cloud but stay safe !

Identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features (20–25%)

We keep the point about security, talking about identity and access management in Azure.

Identity federation with Active Directory, Multi-factor Authentication, Role-Based Access control policies… Everything to keep your Azure account and resources safe and secured.

You will also see how to manage resources using tags and package your environment resources to deploy them at scale using Azure Blueprint.

This section is also here to make your life easier when you will start to safely onboard your team on the platform.

Cost management and Service Level Agreements in Azure (10–15%)

Last but not least, there is a fairly consequent part of your learning about Costs, SLAs and services life-cycles.

The capacity to better optimize costs is one of the main assets of Cloud platforms, you need to learn how to do it ! And I’m sure you can’t wait to know how to comply with your business availability requirements or to try the next Azure features as soon as they are usable !

Face to face with the exam

You know what you need to learn, now let’s have a look at the exam details.

You have 60 min to answer between 40 and 60 questions.

Your time is global for the exam, you are free to divide it at your convenience between questions.

Be sure to plan at least 90 min to do the check-in process and read the instructions. You don’t want to miss anything. Right ?

All questions have checkbox style answers (nothing to write) and you will find different kind of questions:

Multiple choice: 1 or more possible answers (the number is specified in the question ==> please, READ CAREFULLY THE QUESTIONS)
Graphical answers: You will have for example a screenshot of Azure portal and you will need to select the correct service to click on for a particular situation
Drag & Drop: You will need to match some Services or Concepts to the right definition

During the exam, you can flag questions to be able to quickly come back to it at the end if you need to spend more time on it.

This exam description is not the full requirement list. During the learning process, you should check the details on Microsoft website.

Schedule your exam

When you feel ready you can go to the exam page and plan it using the PearsonVue link.

The exam is 99$ but Microsoft run from time to time free virtual learning sessions with a free voucher at the end.

You can chose to take the exam from home or go to an exam centre.

You will have more informations about requirements for the exam during the scheduling process (identity papers, clean workspace…). Be sure to read everything and to check that you will be able to provide the necessary level of workspace confidence and peacefulness if you are doing this from home.

How to prepare the exam

Learning path

The main resource for this exam is the Microsoft Learn platform. It provides modules for free that you can complete at your own pace. This is a full text journey.

There are also some free labs included that you can complete using sandbox. You need to create a free Azure account to have access to the Azure portal and services.

Microsoft Learn path for AZ-900

Beside that, there are a lot of courses over the internet. Free, not free, video, text… If you need more than Microsoft Learn, just choose one and deal with it.

Last step will be to find some question examples. Check free platforms like examtopics but be careful: they might not be up-to-date and you can have some wrong answers in the correction.

For more serious content, you can have a free exam session on Whizlabs and some other for a few $.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

My advice

As a first step, try to have an overview of all concept and services included in the certification.

Then, when your ideas are a little bit more clear about Azure ecosystem, try to understand how services help to fulfil Cloud concepts (fault tolerance, elasticity, high availability…) and how they can interact with each other.

Think about real life use cases. Try to find how you could solve your team issues using Azure services. Or maybe how you would implement a certain architecture into Azure.

It does not have to be very complex example, but being able to refer to real-life helps you to memorize.

On your way, be sure to have a quick look at every concept you don’t understand very well at first sight. If you need, you can build yourself a Wishlist to keep track of the topic you need to check later. I wrote another article about how to use this concept. It is particularly efficient if your are new to the certification and cloud field.

I strongly recommand you to create a free account on the Azure portal. You will be able for free to explore the several services as well as completing the labs offered by the Microsoft Learn path (sandbox).

Spend some time on the Azure portal, especially if you are new to the Cloud field. You will get a better understanding of all the possibilities and you will have the whole picture in mind.

Last but not least, do not hesitate to ask people question. There is a great community of Cloud enthusiasts on forum and social media that can help you. You will solve your issues and meet with interesting people, you will see real-life experience and projects. In seven words:

You will build a strong background knowledge.

Conclusion

This AZ-900 certification is very useful, especially if you are new to the Cloud concepts. If you are already familiar with other Cloud provider, it is the occasion to quickly have an overview of Azure platform.

With some motivation, anyone is able to pass the exam and you will learn a lot in the way. It is very important to understand what you learn. Do not study just for the exam. Keep in mind that the goal is to setup the foundations for your future knowledge.

I hope you are ready to start learning and I wish you good luck on your journey !

Feel free to reach me on Twitter (FlolightC) to keep me updated about your Cloud journey or to ask me questions ! I’m always happy to discuss with you !

Build a simple DevOps pipeline from GitHub to AWS S3 for static website

Florian Clanet — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 16:26:02 +0000

The simplest way to automate the deployment of your static HTML page

Photo by Riley Crawford on Unsplash

One way to host a simple static website is to use AWS S3 to keep your files.

Yes, put your index.html and style files into an S3 bucket named . and you will be ready to publish your content.

Then you could link your own domain using Route 53, add a CloudFront distribution, HTTPS support…

But what about deployment ?

I can assure you that you don’t want to spend any time copy-pasting your pages to the S3 bucket. You have better things to do !

Here is my simple way to automate this. If you are new to the topic, this is a 30 minutes configuration, reading this article included !

So, no more talk and let’s build our pipeline !

To implements the following solution, you will need:

A GitHub account
An AWS account

Here is the idea:

1. Create a GitHub repository for your website — 10min

2. Configure an AWS IAM user — 5min

3. Configure a GitHub Action — 5min

4. Make a change and Deploy — 5min

5. Celebrate — 5min (at least !)

1. Create a GitHub repository

If you already have your repository configured, you can go to Part 2 !

Here, you want to put your code into a repository that will be used to track the changes and trigger the deployment.

1. Go to GitHub and connect to your account
2. Create a new repository

3. Feel free to fill the parameters to have the repository you want

4. Clone the newly created repository to your local laptop using Git command line or your favourite UI tool for Git (mine is GitKraken).

git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-REPOSITORY

You will find the url to use in your repository, clicking on the “Code” button

For more information on the git clone have a look a the GitHub documentation.

5. Put your files on the created folder and push it

git push

An example of a simple site repository:

Now, if you go to https://github.com/<username>/<repositoryname>, you will see your code waiting for you on the main branch !

Fine, let’s have a bit of AWS now !

2. Create an AWS IAM user

Your goal is to push some files to your S3 bucket. For this purpose, you will need to have rights on the S3 bucket.

You will use an IAM user with S3 policy.

1. Open the AWS console
2. Go to the IAM page

3. Click on “Users” in the menu and Add a new user

4. Pick a name and choose the programmatic access

5. You are going to use an existing policy that will give you full control on the S3 service.

(We use this for demonstration simplicity. You can enforce more security by creating your own policy to respect the least privilege principle.)

6. You can put some tags to identify you user if you need it

7. Review your informations and create the user

8. Here you need to keep the Access key ID and the Secret access key somewhere safe. This is the equivalent of your Login-Password.

And that’s it for the AWS IAM part ! Easy stuff right ?

Let’s go back to GitHub !

3. Configure a GitHub Action

You will use a GitHub Action to deploy your files into the S3 bucket.

To make GitHub able to use our AWS user rights, you need to configure the user credentials you just created.

1. Go to the Setting section of your repository menu and click on Secrets

2. Create two new secrets and put the values you kept from the IAM User creation.

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Now that you have our credentials ready, let’s create the workflow itself.

All the steps in your workflow should be created in the .github/workflow/ folder. GitHub Action will monitor this folder to find what to execute.

3. Let’s create a .github/workflow/main.yml

mkdir .github/workflow
touch .github/workflow/main.yml

And add the following code to your main.yml file:

Here you are creating an Action to execute some steps every time a push happen on the main branch. You run your Action on an ubuntu (linux) machine and you have a dependency to one of the already created AWS GitHub Actions.

It configures your credentials as well as the region. It should correspond to the one in which you created your S3 bucket.

Then you can see the Action steps.

As you are pushing a simple html/css folder, you have no build step but you could add some steps here. Maybe generate some build artefacts into a folder and push this folder to the S3 bucket.

You use the aws s3 sync command to synchronise the folder “thefoldertodeploy” with the content of the S3 bucket.

Now you can push this to the main branch.

4. Make a change and Deploy

Now that your Action is configured, change a little thing visible on your website and push this change to the main branch.

Then go to the Actions section of your GitHub repository and observe the steps being executed !

If you want to know more about GitHub Actions, here is a link to spend some time on it !

5. Congrats, it’s celebration time!

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Congrats ! You have just found a way to focus on what really matter: the content !

GitHub Actions is a really good way to implement a simple pipeline for your static website. You can get ready to push modification within minutes and you will never be responsible for your deployments anymore.

From there, you can do a little exploration session on GitHub actions or just add this topic to your Wish list !

*
I'm always open for feedback and questions, here in the comments or on my Twitter*

Use Wish lists and certifications to extend your knowledge

Florian Clanet — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:28:47 +0000

How I learn knew skills in an efficient and durable way

Photo by Lennart Jönsson on Unsplash

IT industry is moving fast, very fast ! And nobody can deny that.

I am not going to teach you something new but being industry-aware is really a Big advantage in IT world ! One way to stay up-to-date on major topics is to study for certification exams. It will also help you expand your knowledge.

I found out, on my way to the exam, that I was learning a lot.

And not just about the topics I needed to pass, but also a lot of other side points I was not aware before. This leads me to try the process in the reverse. I was then trying to learn new things having the certification path in mind to guide me through the journey.

I was trying to learn new things having the certification path in mind to guide me through the journey.

Even if everything I will tell you here worked well for me, it might not work the exact same way for you. I am sharing a way to get new skills in an efficient and durable way. You should definitely adapt my story to your personal experience. Try to find out what are the things that can work for you and apply them to get the best out of your training time.

The Wish List method

Everyone knows what a wish list is !

Santa, weddings, birthday and even IT releases sometimes. Wish lists are the way to keep track of our desires and to fulfil them when the time comes.

Wish lists are great !

And they can even be useful for learning. Weird idea ? Absolutely not !

I am sure everyone got lost at least once in the infinite curiosity loop of internet.

You know, when you read an article, or watch a video and you go check one detail on Google. You click on the first link that have another question in it… and then an hour slipped by.

And you will not memorize for long a big part of what you just read. Wish lists are the key to avoid this and enjoy even more the content you can find through your learning path.

The idea behind Wish lists is simple:

For every topic needing a digression, to check some details or explore an other related topic, you add an entry in your Wish list.

This entry should be well classified into the right part of your Wish list. It should be very easy to check on it later.

For example, it can be a link to a useful blog post.

I was learning about AWS Lambda service and I saw a blog post about Lambda performance.

I immediately add it to my Wish list for later reading !

In this case, reading this at the beginning of my learning would have been kind of a mistake. I didn’t have enough knowledge to get all the technical points. But I felt there was something interesting for later.

I added the Lambda article to my Wish list, in the Lambda>Performance chapter. I knew that the day would come where I would remember this article as ready to be read with my acquired knowledge.

This is a good example but don’t get fooled, I didn’t use this method on the first try ! This is the result of all the mistakes I did, trying to learn a lot in a small amount of time.

After a quick training, I started working on my Solution Architect Associate certification. This is when I began to think about my learning strategy. After a lot of trial and errors, I started to build a habit about learning new things in a regular way. I can tell you: Wish lists are clearly part of this process.

1. Find guidance

As it was my first AWS certification, I looked for some kind of guidance to know where to start. I needed to plan my learning and find a way to check that my knowledge was covering all the exam scope.

Photo by Ayelt van Veen on Unsplash

This is step one to get an overview of your learning scope.

Here are some of the main sources you should start with for every new big topic you are trying to learn. I don’t talk about the documentation written by the provider or the community around the topic. It should be of course the first resource to explore !

1.1 Video courses

Beside the AWS guides and documentation, I found some courses on learning platforms:

This is a good starting point. They organise the content in different sections corresponding to the existing domains in the exam.

They usually also include some labs. Those help you to get a better understanding on how to apply the knowledge you are acquiring through the videos.

From my point of view, this is a good way to plan your journey.

It is a bit like having a tourist guide book showing you the path. You can go the other way but it will always try to have your back if you feel a bit lost in the middle of nowhere !

Photo by Holly Mandarich on Unsplash

1.2 Articles

Blog posts or articles can be a good source of inspiration when trying to build your agenda. Big companies usually have their own blog(s). Reading them gives you a hint on new products, but also practical use cases or tutorials.

Community is very powerful. You will find a lot of people writing on their previous experience. They sometimes even talk about how they organized their learning to pass the exam.

You will find a lot of resources in blogs, be careful not to be diverted from your main goal.

A good way to handle all those resources is to use the wish list method. Be sure to organize your findings in a way it is easy to dive into it later.

1.3 Books

Books can also be useful, as learning material but also as guidance.

Inspire your agenda by the book table of contents.

We can usually assume that the authors have a good understanding of the topic they are writing about. The organization of their work has been knowingly chosen. Make sure you checked several books as they can give you different point of view.

For some interesting references, books can of course be part of your wish list. They can be time consuming but retains also great knowledge. Try to get the best out of this

2. Make your Wish list

The Wish list is the key element of the strategy to be able to reach efficiently my certification goal as well as to learn long-term and valuable knowledge.

You can use whatever software you want (even paper if you want, but this is not very convenient to keep links). Build the wish list template that works for you and the topic your are trying to master.

It can be a simple text editor (Markdown can be a good way to deal with presentation layer). You might even make your Wish lists public.To do so, track them into a GitHub repository (GitKraken would be a good tool to help you with that). Productivity tools like Trello are also nice a way to organize your Wish lists even if it can ask for a bit more organisation at the beginning.

During my AWS architecting journey for example I had a Wish list mostly split by AWS services or sometime by big domains like performance, high-availability, security…

The Wish list can be really huge if you are adding stuff without never reading it. That’s why the organisation should be easy to read for you. When starting an exploration session, you don’t want to spend five minutes looking for the right topic to dive in !

Oh wait ! I didn’t introduce you to Exploration sessions, right ? …

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

3. Split your learning between Sprints and Exploration times

This is a good way to keep your motivation intact through your learning.

Sprints are learning sessions during which you try to cover exam topics. The goal is to progress on the direct path to the exam. It can be by watching a training video, trying some sample questions, memorizing concepts, preparing some training material like notes or cue cards.

Exploration times are here to please your curious self as well as starting to build the knowledge you are looking for. The idea for you is to take the Wish list we made on the previous part and start reducing it. Try visiting the links, digging into the topics, watching videos, reading the articles…

These two kind of learning session are complementary.

Nothing stops you from mixing Sprints with Explorations but make sure you set some time limit for exploration. Indeed, the more curious you are, the more you risk to spend a lot of time digging topics until you land on another one.

“The more curious you are, the more you risk to spend a lot of time digging topics until you land on another one.”

As attractive as this idea sounds, this snowball phenomenon is not the result you want to achieve. You will quickly fall under a lot of equally interesting pieces of information that your brain is not going to be able to prioritize. The consequence is that you are not going to memorize very well what you have just explored.

Start to set specific timing limits. You can just store the underlying topics into your wish list and save it for a later exploration session.

Conclusion

Learning knew things is challenging and time consuming. You knows that if you are a curious human being !

The Wish list method gives you an easy way to organise your learning and to stay focus on your goal during Sprint times.

On the other hand, you will expand your knowledge beyond your smallest goal during Exploration times by building up a strong background knowledge*.*

Using this method to improve your knowledge through certifications path is a great way to become industry aware of a lot of topics. It gives you a significant advantage when looking for interesting opportunities.

I hope this method can improve the way you think about learning.

Having a great time learning is the most important to enjoy what you are learning!

25 must-have softwares for a new install

Florian Clanet — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 08:51:13 +0000

I recently had to configure all my tools after a fresh Windows re-installation.
This went well and quick as I keep up to date a list of my favourites tools. This way, I just need to go through my list and I know I have most of the things I will need to work.
Next step would be to automate those installation but it will be for another article !

I though it was the occasion to make a list of the most useful ones.

So here it is !

Browsers

Those two are the main one I use for my everyday web browsing and basic testing.
Of course, when needed, I switch to other ones like Safari, Edge...

Chrome
Firefox

Utilities

Screenpresso

Perfect to capture your screen (image and video) and edit the screenshot to add information on it.

7-Zip

I think it won't be convenient to introduce 7-Zip any more...
But for every compression job, he'll be there !

f.lux

A nice tool to manage the light coming from your screen. It will adapt it to the time of day and the kind of light you should have on your room.

KeePass or Dashlane

Please don't tell me you keep your passwords and secrets on a piece of paper somewhere near your desk...
Use a password manager like KeePass (local) or Dashlane (synchronized)

LdapAdmin

I use this to have a look at LDAP directories, search for entries. Very useful if you manage some running corporate applications and you sometimes want to check groups and accounts to help people around you.

TreeSize

I think I'm on the best team when it comes to store all kind of "for later" files. This application helps me finding what is taking space on my disk and manage it.

Communication

Nothing big to say here, we all need to communicate with colleagues and other people. My big regret is to have like 4 or 5 application for that depending on who my interlocutor is !

MS Teams / Amazon Chime / G Suite...

Coding related

Of course ! What would we do without it ?

GitKraken

For me the best visual tool to work with Git. It can save a lot of time when you are stressed or trying to solve some git weird issues.

Python

Always have a Python install on your computer ! Think about the number of little things you could automate in your daily life ! If you are interested to know more, check this nice resource: Automate the boring stuff

Insomnia / Postman

If you are building APIs, those two tools should be on your disk !
Insomnia is light and very quick to use whereas Postman is a little bit more complex but allows you to create collections, share them with your team, document it, and a lot of other features

Database access

Here it depends on your database system preference but let's admit that it is always useful to have some of those already installed on your machine !

Edition

I always switch between VS and VSCode depending on the work I do. I mainly use VS for back-end and VSCode for front but it more a habit than anything else !

Notepad++

While VS and VSC are great tools, I feel very comfortable writing quick notes with notepad++. It is like my virtual notebook.

yEd / Visio

Sofwares I open when I don't use online editors like Diagrams

Zeplin

Used by my team for every design related stuff.

Terminal / transfers

I use those to open remote connections when I'm not using simple RDP or ssh solutions. They are useful to store configurations and organize your assets.

cmder

This is a simple command line with useful linux-like commands. But you could also use Windows integrated Bash shell or just Power-Shell if you feel more comfortable with it.

FileZilla

Use the client part to connect to ftp/sftp servers to transfer and retrieve files.
You can save your servers configurations and share them with your team.

Conclusion

This is the list of the main tools I use in my everyday work. If I have some free time, I often start by installing them all so I'll be ready when I need them.

Anyway, use the tools that suit you ! Save your configurations somewhere a make a list like this so you don't spend too much time when your next Windows installation will come !

I hope this article was useful for you. Don't hesitate to give me your feedback on these tools or to suggest me other ones.

You can share this on the comment section bellow or contact me directly on my Twitter !