All the things!

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2 min read

Finalizing my preparation for my AWS Solutions Architect Associate cert and I'm enjoying most of the process. Going through and marveling at the level of detail of Adrian Cantrill's video course. As someone who delivers tech education, it really drives home how powerful visuals can be when explaining something new. Of course, I should have been tipped off to this by the percentage (100!) of students who tell me they are visual learners. I'll come back to this point some day...

The thoroughness (66 hours of content!) of AC's course does make me panic and wonder if i should really just spend more time learning to the test with the idea that I'll come back to his material for later review. This type of thinking has made me more (though not fully) sympathetic to the bootcamp students whom I most recently worked with. We encountered rampant corner-cutting and plagiarism. Students are rightly concerned with the potential (un)employment on the other side of the program and view the certification of our course as something to attain at all costs. As an instructor, I try to drive home that the skills are what's important and not the paper/graduation status. This is the same point made by Mr. Cantrill on reddit and on Slack. Still, it's interesting that when I'm in the role of student I feel far less assured. I-just-want-to-pass-and-then-figure-it-out is short-term thinking. It's very real but imprudent.

I do hope to pass the exam next week as I would like to pivot some of what I'm studying (some cloud, come TypeScript, lotsa Python) and I need some time to work on my graduate classes. On that front, registration opens in a few hours for next semester and it looks like they're offering us a course on computational statistics with Python.

I'll keep you posted.