I’ve spent a long time in this field (Software Development) – the bulk of it as a manager, director, etc who likes to stay close to the code my teams were working on – generally through things like volunteering to be part of the on call rotation, or helping another engineer run our whole ETL pipeline for our Amazon Redshift instances (we worked with Spotify’s Luigi framework in Python until a recent rewrite by a different team in Elixir).
The application I was responsible for was a monolithic Java app deployed with all things AWS. It was fun to learn, a very stable app, and we got to use a lot of AWS services. That said, we stagnated.
The app is being rewritten – but it led me to consider how I want to level up my skills. I need to get current with microservices, ML, fun new languages, etc.
I’ve dabbled the last few months with things like Erlang, spent a lot of time playing deep with Postman as I work on REST integrations with Zoho CRM and SaaS products – but I feel I needed more.
I’ve always wanted to complete an AWS Solution Architecture cert for me – just to validate that what I think I know is accurate and gain new skills in the process.
So I’ve looked at the current AWS certs that are now available and looked at the overlap.
My primary focus is to work on the AWS Machine Learning Engineer certification path and if it’s still interesting work on the missing two certs to complete the Solution Architect certification since they overlap quite a bit.
However, I might want to skip that in favor of a suggested learning path from a good friend. He suggested the following when I asked him his thoughts about getting current with AWS Solution Architecture, throwing in some M/L and Docker/Kubernetes.
“So, if I were to rank the priorities based on your thoughts, I might suggest:
- AWS Solutions Architect (including core services, maybe touching on Lambda)
- Understanding/Building RAG applications (leveraging AWS ML services)
- Go (or perhaps Docker/Kubernetes, depending on your immediate interests)”
I liked this plan, so I worked with my virtual pal (Chat GPT) to come up with an ordered plan to get some current experience.
Something like this:
- AWS Machine Learning Engineer
- AWS Solution Architect (optional if I want to do those 2 extra certs)
- Practical ML Engineering and RAG – learning vector databases, RAG pipelines and a project
- Golang
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Some sort of made up capstone project
I want to learn these things anyway, and getting the certs is far less important than gaining the skills to me – so in the end I’ll judge how much time I want to spend studying for a test vs moving on to the next step.
I’ve got my plan, I’ve got a checklist, and I’m ready to start! I’ll document my journey along the way!