Work to become, not to acquire

Work to become, not to acquire

- 8 mins

It’s not what you achieve, it’s what you overcome. That’s what defines your career.

I finally finished the roadmap that I found and got one of the last certifications on the list!

It has been over 12 years since I found the Comptia IT Roadmap. In college at the time I knew that I wanted to be in the IT industry but I didn’t know where my interests and current skills would fit. Finding this roadmap allowed me to focus my attention on a direction/path to take to achieve my goals. This roadmap has been one of the best and worst things to happen to me. At the time my goal was to get certified in all the things. Just before the world became obsessed with social media and content creation I thought that getting all the certifications that were top tier and high end would get me a six figure salary and a happy life. However, as I followed many engineers, programmers, technicians, and other people in the IT field that would follow the latest trends or jump to the latest technologies I found myself falling more and more in love with Linux, the values and morals of open source technology and open source culture, and the vast amount of things I can learn by just utilizing the Linux Operating system. The good was that Linux allowed me to stay focused when my friends would joke about Linux or mention that windows is better because of XYZ (which still happens at my current job and will probably happen for life).

I spent a lot of my early years, after getting the Comptia A+ certifications, following trends and learning about a lot of different tech tools, trends, and learning everything. The roadmap shows that many of the same certifications can be used in the same learning paths so I thought that I was working through it with ease, however, I learned I was wrong. I would like to think that this roadmap was a great tool to use as a guideline. It has allowed me to work at places like Nike Inc and tons of other places. I have been lucky and grateful to be where I am now, however, stacking certifications may also look misleading to recruiters and hiring managers. Its important to take your time when learning something new and remember that “All good things take time”.

I spent many nights jumping around from trend to trend trying to learn new programming languages and technologies, but nothing ever stuck. One of the reasons was because none of them peaked my interest enough to keep the passion alive. A lot of the things I was learning were things that would make me money, and although it sounds crazy coming from a person who was born and raised in the Country built off Capitailism, its true. I don’t regret any of it because things like Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes, Devops principles, the 12 factor app, came out of those long study nights. Learning those things and adding them to my toolbelt have been helpful, but once I realized how niche my Linux knowledge was I began to focus on getting Linux specific certifications and created a fixed path for myself. My knowledge these days span far and wide. I have a myriad of tools, languages, and technologies managed and maintained, or learned over time, but my knowledge for Linux keeps me grounded and is the foundation in which my career has been built.

It’s not what you achieve, it’s what you overcome. That’s what defines your career. The challenges I have faced, things that range from creating a bash script for a cron job that pulls excel files from an FTP servers to automating the upgrade and deployment of docker images that get pushed to AWS ECS to meet HIPPA compliance, have made me fall in love with Linux more and more.

Lately, the annual increase of people interested tech field, remote IT work, or cybersecurity, has grown and brought up alot of attention. The changes in AI that have caused big tech companies to lay off talent in favor of AI, along with other companies following suite, has lead me to question what my next step will be when I finish this roadmap. With large company CEO’s like Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, who mentioned Not to learn Computer Science anymore, I wonder what the world will look like in one year, 5 years, 10 years even. Regardless of my feelings or other content creators feelings about this “dont learn to code” droplet, its created a ripple affect in the tech industry. Luckily, I have found a new interest in the Linux Kernel and low-level(embedded) programming. I think it should help in the same way that focusing my attention on linux while the world is focusing on the Cloud helped me build a strong foundation. The idea in kernel development, just like the idea in learning about Linux is that it’s used everywhere and will allow me to stay employed and keep the passion for learning alive. The popular supply and demand quote “When the world is looking for gold, sell shovels” aligns with what I think i’m trying to convey. AI, in its current form uses LLM’s (large language models) in our modern software to help with text and image prediction and production. I can see it being used for heavy Data analytics and possibly become the very thing that people feared in Terminator, but my thoughts behind those movies was always geared towards “Who wrote the code behind those things and how do the link back to the source they they get all this data?”. I’m sure I will find out soon enough. I think that while everyone is searching to follow trends and look for the biggest paying jobs or highest paying marketing techniques, i’m going to keep digging and find low level projects to tackle.

Conclusion

I would like to say My Resume speaks for itself, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t fully explain my love for Linux and Open Source technology. Neither does it showcase my full skill or talents. I’m just hoping that this blog might, and that one day when my daughter is able to ready fully (she’s only 2 & 1/2 now) she will be able to read this and be proud of me.

This blog was one of the first projects I started when I wanted to share my work and showcase some of the things I was learning at the time. I still feel like no one will read this or mention that they read it but its still nice to share and has helped once during an interview. It was projects like this that helped me share my love for Linux and this roadmap that helped me build a foundation towards my career and the trajectory of it. Each certificate has a story behind it and something that I have learned with it, and that is what makes me the Linux Engineer that I am today. I hope that someone reading this will use the roadmap or share the roadmap and it gets used to help someone else stay focused in their career.

PICTURE TIME

A girlfriend gave me a box that I filled up with RAM that I had laying around on my desk at the house I grew up in. Said it was to help fix my computers. The box was a candy box with quotes in it. I decided to take a picture and use that as my facebook header picture at the time. The picture still reigns true and I used it as my twitter and linkedin banner because of its many meanings. “What cannot be cured must be endured” and a box of me “Memories” have been great reminders of creating a good learning foundation and staying true to oneself.

What cant be cured

Certificates I've collected over the years

CompTIA IT Certification Roadmap Link