DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 closed with a great talk from Forrest Brazeal. As a cloud architect, musician, writer, and cartoonist, he’s got an impressive resume of his own, but he also has a project to help aspiring cloud engineers improve their skills and their resume.

Forrest’s Cloud Resume Challenge is a set of steps for building oneself an online resume using a variety pack of cloud technologies. It’s enough guidance to tell someone what to do, and not too much guidance on how to do it, which suits me just fine. There are a lot of good tutorials online to fill in any gaps. Forrest’s work gets people past the “I have no idea where to start” point, onward to the “hmm… how would I do that?” point, where curiosity can take over.

I learn best by doing. Watching someone demo or listening to a lecture only gets me so far. I need to twist the knobs and see what they do, break and fix things several times, go down a few dead ends and have to retrace my steps back. Granted, it can be frustrating — for example, breaking my site that WAS working, and not being able to spot what I’d done to make AWS unhappy. It’s also reminding me just how much I’ve forgotten (CSS…) in a few years of disuse, which is humbling. But it’s all overshadowed for me by how satisfying it is to try out a technology I’ve never used before (like CloudFront) and make it work.

Here’s Forrest’s talk from the Summit: Transformed! A Musical DevOps Journey. (Registration is free and will get you 10 free videos per month from past conferences — the videos are great, well worth getting on a mailing list.)

My Cloud Resume Challenge website so far: developerleaf.com

And yes, it’s back up… for now…

Originally posted 19 August 2023 on Medium.