DEV Community: George Wettlaufer

Back on the grind

George Wettlaufer — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:12:58 +0000

Long journey back

I'm making this post to document that I'm back to my ways of studying and learning. I had a bit of a downfall in life for about 16 months. Played a game called New World and got lost in life for a bit. To give you guys context I have 3 AWS certifications and made this website. In the last 16 or so months I had a job for maybe 2 or so months. Still don't have a job, Currently things are kinda rough for me right now but I'm not going to let that stop me.

Learning

I started to dig deep into the programming language(golang). It seems like I enjoy coding in go. I'm not going to say I'm proficient in it but go is a joy to code in. The reason I chose to learn go was because of its speed. Go and cloud computing go really well together, and go is good with a lot of other stuff as well. Another thing about go is its not too hard to learn either.

Tools

I wanted to shed some light on the text editor that I really enjoy using. The text editor I use is Kate(KDE Advanced Text Editor). Kate's website. Kate does support LSP's(Language Server Protocol) which makes Kate very powerful. Kate is really light weight and very responsive. Also has a very configurable UI. Also I've switched to linux full time for about 4 months now. My linux distro is Fedora at the moment. Needless to say im a big fan of linux.

Goals

My goals are first and foremost get a job. I would love to work with go and AWS or any other cloud provider. My other goal is to restructure my website. I want to take terraform out of the picture and use go with the aws cdk. I'm also thinking about implementing htmx to rebuild the website.

Outro

Whoever does take the time read this, first thing is thank you, the second thing is you can't give up. I know especially in tech right now the job market is in weird state right now. But that's not stopping from me applying to jobs. Remember you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.

My journey through the Cloud Resume Challenge

George Wettlaufer — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 16:23:49 +0000

Life Background

I'll start with a little bit about myself. I used to be a logger for up until about 3 or so years ago and I loved it. It was a family business that my family started way back in the 40s. But that love sorta got lost. I didn't think I would ever quit logging but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like there was more to life for me out there some where. So I left the logging industry and got a job at the local hospital.

The job at the hospital was a different change of pace and it was easy going. But it was just a job to make ends meet. It was about 3 months into that where I decided what direction I wanted to go. I watched a video that was made by Network Chuck on YouTube that was about AWS. That video was the start of my whole AWS journey. Every little free time I had I spent studying.

I had to sacrifice a lot of time to take notes and study, but in the end I ended up getting 3 AWS certifications. I got the certified cloud practitioner, the solutions architect, and the solutions architect professional certifications.

By the time I got those certifications the hospital I was working at downsized and I was let go. So as I write this I'm on Unemployment. You can put me in that crowd of maybe if I get these certifications that would get me a job. There maybe instances where certifications alone might get you a job but that is few and far between in my opinion. I had to decide what's the best thing to put on my resume to just show that I'm serious. I had to tell myself I have to much time into getting those certifications to give up. So I found the cloud resume challenge.........

Cloud Resume Challenge

The cloud resume challenge was created by Forrest Brazeal and on the surface the challenge might seem easy but when you dig real deep you realize there's more to it then just creating a website on a cloud service of you choice. To summarize the challenge you not only do have to create a website of your resume but you have to create a API and you have to fetch that API somewhere on your site. That API has to invoke a lambda function that writes a value to a DynamoDB table. Did I forget to mention that you have to use a infrastructure as code to automate the whole process? and then you have to create a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub and GitHub actions.

I remember in my challenge reference book that Forrest stated there were going to be times where you might have 10-15 tabs open trying to research the issue your currently facing, and boy was he right. Some of the issues that I faced were the dreaded CORS policy when I was trying to fetch my API. Then I had to figure out how to parse that response and make it visible on my site. Also had to figure out how the lambda function was going to talk to the DynamoDB table. Long story short there was some situations where I had to do a lot of testing and research.

The infrastructure of code tool that I used was terraform. I Had to learn how terraform worked and how it works with AWS. Terraform is a very powerful tool that is widely popular because it works with multiple cloud providers. To transform all of my architecture into terraform and to see terraform apply all of those resources was truly a site to see.

This image below gives a rough idea of what resources were used.

The Ending

I wanted to close out this blog with a message for the people that want to take the challenge. This challenge will test your patience, this challenge will frustrate you but you can't give up. This is where I think Forrest Brazeal does a great job of making you figure out stuff on your on so you can actually learn it. You have to keep in mind that this will probably be best thing you can do for your resume. Yea certifications are great and they look good but you have to bolster those certifications with some hands on projects. I highly recommend visiting the Cloud Resume Site for more information.

Links

CloudResumeChallengeWebsite

MyResumeWebsite

Special Thanks

I would like Forrest Brazeal for creating a tough challenge. I would also like to thank everyone that helped me in the discord and to those that I reached out on LinkedIn.

First Blog Post

George Wettlaufer — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 20:35:00 +0000

This is my first blog post of really any sorts. I'm Currently working on the cloud resume challenge. Cloud Resume Challenge I choose to do the cloud resume challenge to demonstrate a hands-on project with AWS. Right at the moment I'm probably about 65 percent done with it, and plan on writing another post explaining it once I'm done. I've put the challenge on the back burner in hopes to get my certification in terraform. Which terraform is a infrastructure as code tool that automates its infrastructure in any cloud provider AWS, Azure or GCP so its very versatile. The code editor I'm currently using is visual studio code. I currently have the AWS CCP,SAA,SAP certifications and plan on getting more in the future. The one thing I have learned throughout this process is certifications are important but having a hands on project to relate to is as equally if not more important. You need to show employers that you actually know what your talking about and it shows your true quality's as a person.