It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you.
Doing something different, giving life updates!
It’s been a while since my last blog post, over a month now. In these last six weeks, I’ve been extremely busy with a lot of different things. I’m writing this post to update the small audience I have while also getting my thoughts out as I continue the journey.
Career
First, I finished my internship, graduated college, and got a full-time job within three weeks. This year has been a lot and came with some major growth from January to now. I set a 24-month plan for myself almost two years ago and I am currently ahead of schedule. I can’t help but be extremely thankful to everyone who has played a piece in my growth to this point. As I stated earlier, I’ve been extremely busy over this time. I am writing this blog from my hotel while in Germany on the latter half of a two-week work trip. I told my family I always wanted to travel for work, truthfully I would be satisfied with being in the U.S. so I’m extremely grateful for these opportunities. Lastly, I’m thankful to be working with many people who are much smarter than I am in many different areas. I’m always looking to learn and grow which makes this the perfect situation.
Projects + Homelab
If you take a look at the last few posts of mine, you can see I was building what you could call a “web app”, which is also my photography portfolio. This was my “big project” which allowed me to get my hands on a lot of AWS Services, JS, HTML, CSS, Python, and more Terraform. This project is finished. The last step was adding Real User Monitoring (RUM) to the app, which I’ll be writing a post on soon. Besides the minor updates and support of the app that I’ll have to do forever, my hands are now off. I’m going to figure out how to automate some more things about the site, like creating new portfolio pages, generating pre-signed URLs from a list of images, and whatever else comes to mind.
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/kwehen/Static-Portfolio/
Python
On top of all of the other influences that have made me as busy as I am, I also find the time to work on a few other projects outside of the one above. I’ve been dead set on building my Python skills recently before I switch to another language. This has involved an attempt at creating a weather app, working with different libraries, and soon some IOT and Web Scraping projects.
Automation
Python also plays a part in the automation that I have been working on at and outside of work. Python, Terraform, Ansible, Powershell, and whatever else is thrown at me I’m going to learn and utilize. I remember over a year ago not understanding the importance or need for different automation, IaC, etc. Once you have to tear down and re-deploy a configuration you made more than two times or make a bunch of minor changes to your infrastructure without 100 clicks you will see. I say that to say I have been and will be diving deeper into automation. Speaking of automation…
Homelab & More Projects
Part of working a job with so many smart people is all the ideas passed around and added to the collection. I blog a lot about the cloud, I do all of my projects in the cloud. But as we know, the cloud is just someone else’s computer. I’ll continue to integrate the cloud into a lot of my projects because cloud computing is a skill that is needed in tech. But there are also plenty of things that’d be much easier and I’d much rather host locally while not having to deal with the pay-as-you-go pricing model that the cloud offers. That being said, I’m going to start building out my homelab, and you can expect plenty of blog posts to follow behind it.
Life
Relationship building is a skill. Some naturally acquire the skill, some do not. I happen to be the latter. I use the same methods I take to build my hard skills to soft skills like these. Scheduling monthly calls with people, checking in, giving and getting advice, going to lunch/coffee/dinner, etc. These relationships are not meant to be transactional, just genuine friendship/mentorship.
Lesson
I can only speak for myself, but WORK HARD. Also, work smart. The best shot is the next shot. I’m constantly thinking about how the decisions I make today will affect me tomorrow, next week, next year, and 10 years from now. Now back to work…
