I posted about this before but I am a huge advocate of online learning and have been for a while. As I mentioned before Udemy offered a challenge in January 2024 to see if users could establish a 12 week streak. When I wrote that post I was sitting at 68 weeks… And now (as of today 7/9/25):
Woo Hoo!
I’ve listed the courses I’ve taken on another page on this site. It’s interesting to me to see how my interests have evolved, but it’s time to zero in on certain topics. More depth, less breadth.
So now I find myself at a crossroads – there is so much I want to learn and unfortunately not enough time to do it all! For the remainder of 2025 I’m going to shift focus a bit.
Instead of leveraging our Enterprise Udemy account at work I’ll shift to a pair of personal Udemy accounts. So any streak I start there will be new, on top of the 80 weeks I have now – the streak is only important to me for my motivation.
As I’ve mentioned before, our public library offers a free Udemy Enterprise account which is an amazing benefit. I have a personal account as well because sometimes there is a course I start that I really love and want to make sure I buy (good instructors will keep updating courses). I’m doing that to maintain progress in case these enterprise accounts go away.
As far as my current focus – I said I’d do the following on May 15th:
- AWS Machine Learning Engineer certification path
- AWS Solutions Architect certification (optional)
- Practical ML Engineering with RAG — vector databases, embeddings, pipelines, and a hands-on project
- Golang (or after the capstone, if time is tight)
- Docker and Kubernetes (CKAD certification included)
- Capstone project deploying a production-grade RAG chatbot
I’ve been making progress in a more circuitous route. Since that post I’ve spent time hands on with n8n, Docker, some Vector DB labs, and shaking some Python rust off on a home lab I am setting up.
Now that I am wrapping up the “pre-req” phase of that plan I’ll likely start the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course on Udemy by Stephane Maarek. His courses are great, and I’ll work on this casually as I keep playing with my “lab”.
You can see some of his Udemy catalog here:
TLDR; shifting where my online learning happens and will be starting new streaks to add to my current run. Thanks for reading!