I didn't start in tech. I hold a Bac+5 (Master's-equivalent) in agricultural engineering from the State University of Haiti. A year ago, I made the decision to fully pivot into cloud and software engineering ; and I want to document that journey publicly, mistakes included.
Where I started
I began with the fundamentals: completed CS50W (Harvard/edX) to build a real foundation in web development, then earned the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification to understand the AWS ecosystem end to end ; compute, storage, networking, IAM, billing.
What I'm building
To make the learning concrete, I designed and deployed a full-stack school management system using Django and React ; handling authentication, role-based access control, and a relational database for student records and scheduling. It's live, and the repo is public: https://github.com/JuniorSEVERE-WEB/college_quisqueya-version2-.
Where I'm headed
I'm currently deep in AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) prep ; working through VPC design, high availability patterns, and cost-optimized architectures. Terraform and Kubernetes are next on the list, since infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration are non-negotiable for the DevOps roles I'm targeting.
Why I'm sharing this
Career transitions are hard to do in isolation, especially outside the usual tech hubs. I'm based in Léogâne, Haiti, and I've found the AWS learning ecosystem (Skill Builder, Cloud Quest, Jam) invaluable for structured, hands-on practice without needing a team or a classroom. I'll be posting updates as I go, SAA exam results, what tripped me up in Terraform, and how the school management project evolves.
If you're on a similar path-career switcher, self-taught, building in public . I'd love to connect.
Top comments (1)
Fellow career-switcher from a completely unrelated field here (physical therapy, in my case), so this one hit home. The line about doing this in isolation, outside the usual tech hubs, is the part most write-ups skip — the hardest resource to find isn't a course, it's the feeling that someone like you has done this before. For what it's worth: your agricultural engineering background isn't a detour, it's an edge. The people who can connect software to a real domain — farms, clinics, logistics — end up building things pure-CS folks never think of. A full-stack school management system one year in, self-taught, from Léogâne? You're further along than you probably feel on the hard days. Keep documenting it.