NikCreate

What is this site? Who is Nick? Are these the questions we ask ourselves?

What is this site?

The current purpose of this website is for Nick to convey his learnings and insights from working as a Software Developer / Cloud Engineer for the last five years. He will attempt to cement his understanding of different cloud architectures, programming languages and various design patterns. Between working across AWS, GCP and Azure, studying for certifications and various side projects and curiosities, this site has great potential if Nick can just commit to consistent blogging.

Who is Nick?

I’m Nick, and I currently work as a DevOps Engineer and have been working in the industry since 2017. I first got interested in coding back when keeping a travel blog on a backpacking trip during a gap year in my arts degree. I found myself paying for WordPress plugins and looking into the HTML code to edit pages, as well as reading others travel blogs discussing how they worked as app developers remotely. It was during that trip I went through an initial Python course and caught the coding bug. This was back in 2015 and through various MOOCs, coding meetups and conferences, I ended up attending a coding bootcamp shortly after graduation and got my first Software Engineer position soon after.

Tech over time

I got started with Python with PyCon and ChiPy’s mentorship program especially helping to inspire me to keep coding. After graduation, Hack Reactor helped me learn how to work with full stack JavaScript, developing apps with teams and learning the Git flow and Agile development process. From there, I started working with C# and did a bit of app development, though found the companies I worked for moving into the cloud. Getting a couple AWS certifications at my first job at a CRM platform ended up leading me into a career focused on DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure, working heavily in Terraform, Ansible and AWS at present and learning the best ways to serve applications to a large number of users.

My history with blogging

Since Hack Reactor, I’ve kept a blog on and off, but I mostly only wrote when I wasn’t working or when I was working on a side project. For someone with 5 AWS certifications, I never wrote a blog post about anything I learned from that process. I’ve worked with Terraform almost daily for the last few years and haven’t written about it at all. Looking back, I regret that a bit.

Still, at times, I have made good use of my blog. Initially, I’d write about data structures and algorithms while looking for work. Since starting work, my writing has been infrequent and usually focused on a specific side project. My first project was to go through existing Kaggle competitions and tune algorithms to learn about ML and its use cases. At some point, I felt that I needed to read and summarize every article from Amazon’s Builders Library, so I did.

What was probably my favorite use of my blog came as a response to my imposter syndrome getting into the technology industry with an unrelated degree. I always wondered what I would have learned in a computer science degree program that I didn’t learn on my path. Having heard of MIT Open CourseWare and starting a few of their algorithm classes and math classes in the past (only to get distracted after a couple lectures), I decided to answer that question. I found MIT’s requirements for their computer science degree, took all of the non gen-ed courses and found that MIT OCW had all but one of the courses. I went through each lecture of each course, keeping notes and writing summaries on my takeaways of each over the course of 5 months. While my course notes may not be the most readable, I’m glad to have my summaries and you can read an overview of that project here.

My future with blogging

I’d like to blog more frequently on topics more relevant to my work and felt it was time to come up with a better name than “ProjectIDK” and stop using a Django/Angular webapp that I’d keep needing to remind myself how to deploy. The name and old blog was created at a time when I wasn’t yet employed and I used Django/Angular to try and impress employers by showing them a living example of a web app I’d developed. While I learned a lot and don’t regret deploying it at a time, I’ve decided to switch back to WordPress to make it easier to write another post at any time. VirtuosoVirtual is a new era for my tech blog and a commitment to write regularly about the technologies I’ve worked with and what I’m working on. Expect one new blog post a week from this site, since my future with blogging has already begun.