JHammond CSUMB

     This week I finished the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, which felt really good to finally complete. For next week, I’m planning to continue working toward Azure Fundamentals and hopefully get that done in time. I’m also continuing with the fast.ai deep learning course. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish it within the timeline, but I still want to keep going with it since it’s really interesting and something I want to pursue beyond just this class. The main challenge right now is trying to get Azure Fundamentals done in time, so I’m focusing on that.

 This week I got through the first four lessons of the fast.ai Practical Deep Learning course, which has been pretty challenging but really interesting and already has me thinking of some cool project ideas. I also went ahead and scheduled my AWS Cloud Practitioner exam for Monday 3/30 and have been working through practice tests to get ready. Next week I want to keep pushing forward with fast.ai, but I also want to start working back toward Azure Fundamentals so I stay somewhat aligned with my original proposal. The main challenge right now is just balancing everything and keeping up with the pace, but nothing I need help with at the moment.

     This week I wrapped up my Pluralsight courses for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, so now I am getting ready to schedule the exam for next week. Moving forward, I am planning to start the fast.ai course while continuing to brush up on AWS so I feel solid going into the test. One thing I am working through is adjusting my original plan since I decided to move away from Azure Fundamentals for now. I realized I wanted a bit more variety instead of stacking two cloud certs back to back, so I am pivoting toward the fast.ai course to mix things up and keep it well rounded.

The section 2 Scrum videos were on why Scrum works so well in real projects. It focuses on keeping teams flexible, communicating often, and making steady progress instead of trying to plan everything perfectly upfront. I also liked the idea that the goal is always to deliver the most important work first, while constantly improving as the project moves forward.

I am beginning a Scrum certification, which I chose because Agile and Scrum practices are used across many roles and industries, making them valuable regardless of specific technology or position. This week I reviewed the core ideas behind Scrum, including its principles, roles, and processes. While I have worked within Scrum teams before from a contributor perspective, this material helped me better understand the bigger picture of how everything fits together.

Working as a group using GitHub with branches, pull requests, merges, and code reviews. This stood out the most and should probably be all five points because it reflects how real software teams actually work. Learning how to coordinate changes, review other people’s code, and merge conflicts was extremely valuable, and I honestly wish this had been introduced much earlier in the program. Given how group centric the CSUMB computer science program is, we have been working on group projects since the first class, and this course made it clear that I had already developed some bad habits over the past two years. The AWS lab. Cloud infrastructure is everywhere in the professional world, and getting hands on experience with EC2, RDS, security groups, and deployment helped connect a lot of abstract ideas to real systems. I hear these terms constantly at work, and while the lab did not make me an expert, simply understanding what something like an S3 bucket is when it comes up has been incred...