Author: cdnuzzo

Thinking about what your true dream job would be can really help you organize your thoughts, set learning goals, and process your emotions. It will take some time, but the activity is really worth it.  Below are my key motivators and inspirations I took from actual jobs that exist on the Web.

Motivators:
– Computer Science
– Open-Source
– Digital Privacy
– Remote, Mental/Emotional Health
– VPN, Proxy, VFX/Creative
– Learning & teaching

Inspired by Actual Jobs:
– Senior SRE at DuckDuckGo
– Infrastructure Team member at GitLab
– Kernel Engineer at System76
– Linux Systems Developer at ProtonMail
– SRE at Mullvad VPN

You can see my dream job posting in a PDF here.

Other Considerations:
– Systems Administrator at Industrial Light & Magic
– “Open Source Advocate” for a “tech company” I like.
– Participate in Creative Process for films (i.e. Blender)
– Team Lead or Manager

Contact me if you have any questions or comments.

2019 in Review

Accomplishments:

• went out West for LinuxFest Northwest
• met my lovely girlfriend
• promoted at my job
• established morning & evening routines
• updated this site with detailed About page
• developed an ECS deployment pipeline
• donated to No Agenda
• applied Stoicism and minimalism to my life all year
• understood the importance of digital privacy
• won my fantasy football league

Thoughts on 30 Day Challenges:

I developed habits, but overall it was too much. Going to stick with general goals for 2020.

Goals for 2020

I have broken up my goals into three categories: Personal, Work, and Career. Personal is self-explanatory. Work is directly related to my day-job. And, career is meant for exploration of new skills and continuing to improve other skills that will help out my overall career.

Personal:

1. keep with exercise plan
   1. 3 days in week, count calories
2. Stay on budget
   1. number spent not over at end-of-year
3. Personal blog posts
   1. 5 for minimalops.com
   2. 5 for metalmonkeys.blog
   3. 3 for craignuzzo.tech
4. Get off Google
5. Record my self singing

Work:

1. earn the AWS Architect Associate certification
2. give back to a FLOSS project
3. learn CI/CD best practices
4. contribute to our DI Dashboard moreso
5. replace old work Mac

Career:

1. continue SRE/SysAdmin/DevOps learning
2. be very comfortable with Python
3. be proficient in Terraform, CloudFormation and IaaC in general

Looking ahead…

2021 Goals

• logging
• bug bounty
• apply for other gigs to stay fresh

Thirty day challenges have been around for a good while. I doubt just one person came up with them. I even did one last year for a 30 Day Social Media detox, which was amazing to do. I highly recommend. I went cold-turkey on my Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and Twitter. I found that I had more time to think, felt better emotionally and got a lot done in that time. Today, I do use all four but I have a lot of restrictions like I block my Facebook wall with a browser add-on and I only check Twitter once in the morning and evening like I treat my e-mail. Instagram and SnapChat are only opened if somebody directly sends me something.

That brings me to my 12 months of 30-ish Day Challenges, which was a recent inspiration from filmmaker and minimalist Matt D’Avella from his 12 Habits For Life YouTube video.  Go check it out and come back to see mine.

So after I started thinking about and listing out my 30 Day Challenges, I came up with the idea to do a 30 Day Tech Challenges list as well since I have so many skills, tools and programming languages I want to learn and perfect upon. So below you will see my list of 12 Tech Challenges and just below that you’ll see my “non-tech” ones. They are all subject to change and I will try to keep them updated.

30 Day Tech Challenges

January: Apache Kafka.

February: Python, Terraform and perfect Tmux.

March: continue Python, Terraform.

April: continue Python, Terraform. GatsbyJS. Apache Airflow. Back-up solutions.

May: continue Python, LPIC-1 study

June: AWS CLI, bash, MySQL. Watch a Linux Webinar. Complete Apache Airflow Master course.

July: Haskell. Only use VIM. Functional Mindset Month Check out NixOS. Functional JS. tmux. do a GatsbyJS site.

August: LPIC-1 study & exam. Build your own something. Start a project that is useful utilizing all technology and skills (i.e. DevOps, git, CI/CD, IaC, etc.).

September: Bitcoin under-the-hood with Python. Look into Kubernetes.

October: Operating Systems from Scratch & Kubernetes at edX. Continue on project. Start personal blog on GatsbyJS and host in AWS on S3.

November: Linux From Scratch install. master git. Continue on project.

December: try a new Linux distro every day. Also, install BSD and others. Check out FreeBSD Handbook Report findings.

30 Day Challenges

January: Organize self with new productive tools and come up with motivational organized tactics like this.

February: Minimalist Game as explained by The Minimalists in their YouTube video.

March: Whole30. No Coffee No Juice. Read about what Whole30 is here.

April: YouTube, Twitter and Reddit purge. Same idea as Minimalist Game but for my YouTube subscribed channels and saved videos.

May: go to gym every morning before work.

Monday: Biceps
Tuesday: Chest
Wednesday: Back
Thursday: Triceps
Friday: Shoulders
Saturday: Legs
Sunday: Rest

June: Birthday month, need some relax time.

July: First tattoo.

August: Record self singing. Set aside an hour at least for recording and setting up portfolio site.

September: Set up a dedicated page for “Computer Learning Resources”, specific to Linux, SysOps, DevOps, etc.

October: Water Challenge – Drink a gallon a day AND Audiobook Challenge. Listen to one for at least 45 minutes every day & Walk outside every day for at least 30 minutes (weather permitting). YubiKey set up.

November: Buy a new phone. Set up LinageOS and Ting. No Google Challenge, switch to NextCloud and ProtonMail, anticipate deleting Google account in 2020. Set up a wiki for documenting SysAdmin and SRE related things.

December: Push-up Challenge or some other crazy exercise. Personal NAS set up.

Looking ahead to 2020:

• Did this work? Review it. What I learned or did not.
• Set up another for 2020? More broad?
• OKR format?
• Do a Linux journey v2.
• Computer Resource page
• Exercise / Meal Plan for 6 months. BMI Goal

Last updated October 28, 2019.

I was digging through some old documents on my main machine and came across a little extra credit submission I did while I was doing my C.S. degree.

The question in class asked if a Top-Down or Bottom-Up approach is more productive in the C.S. education world.

I thought I’d share:

The approach we took in this class seems to be something that a non-Computer Science major would take. Everyone that goes to college will be using a computer in some form or another. The extent of their computer use will most likely be dependent on how they grew up, where they grew up and what they are studying. For example, a student in Farm Studies will still use a computer to write papers, but her or she would not be using it as extensively as say a Biology major that has some analysis program to utilize. This brings me to myself and Computer Science students. We obviously use computers and we learn how they work, so we use them inherently more than any other major in college. But, this is a misconception, most of our classes are actually about how computers work; the fundamental science. We could learn about this stuff without even initializing an operating system. We must know how binary works, then how circuits bring them together, then how that code utilizes these circuits by means of manipulating the hardware. It makes sense to learn this bottom-up approach if we had more time on our hands. For me, I learned how computers work by going back and forth between these two approaches without even knowing these approaches existed. I essentially looked at them separately. I would watch YouTube videos on how electricity worked, how software code worked, how binary worked, learn about different OS code; then over time I have developed an understanding of abstraction in the computer model. If it was up to me and had no prior knowledge, I’d use the top-down approach and think this will be more prevalent in the future.

If a kid is interested in computer science and wants to enroll in a computer science program at College X, then we must assume that he or she only knows how to use the computer. [I will be using “he” and I am still implying a girl as well] He might not know anything about binary. He might not know what programming language his operating system uses. So I think that a top-down approach would work out better for those kids with the minimum CS knowledge. If we begin by taking apart programs that he is familiar with at a user level, then he can dissect them. “Oh…so that’s how that works!” Similar to a medical student learning about anatomy. They don’t learn about the chemical make-up of a red blood cell first. They might, I have no idea, but to me they wouldn’t. They’d first look at the body as a whole and learn what systems it has then take those apart. This was how my high school health class went. Then if more interest ensues from their, kids can learn how each system works and what each system is made up; in essence, going to medical school. From there they focus on a certain medical field and fix those issues (i.e. urology, podiatry, etc.)

I see the trend in computer science being this: 1) Learn as a kid to enjoy the computer, 2) take it apart and learn the overall way it works, 3) learn what each subsystem is made up, 4) learn how each subsystem talks to each other, 4) learn how each subsystem works at a code level, and 5) learn how each ingredient of the subsystem works (binary, circuits, code, etc.). With all this fundamental knowledge, we can then go on to bigger things like cloud computing architecture, system administration, software engineering, quantum computing (double majors with Physics apply here!), and so on. Computer science is going to change as the computer itself will, but the fundamentals will not, so learning the fundamentals as quickly and efficiency as possible will make the most sense. That is a reason why the top-down approach will work.