Blue And Gold Ceremony, Tech Learning

Blue and Gold Ceremony

Thus ends one of the most interesting, endearing period in my life. Wow, I loved being Cubmaster. After this ceremony I will become the Pack Committee Chair and work more on Cub Scouting itself. I don’t foresee me going up through the Council level though, although I will be getting more involved at the District level. I will always appreciate being able to work with youth. I won’t miss the stress of it though, I wanted so bad for the Pack to thrive. I was constantly buried and probably took on more than I needed to take on, spending 20-25 hours a week on it, every week, for 52 weeks straight. That’s why my tech studying fell behind and I had to push off my certification testing. Now that it’s over though I do plan on shifting gears and using my new found free time to pursue some career goals. I do wonder, if I had to do it all over again, would I chosen a path working with youth more?

Tech Learning

I am now officially upgrading my tech know-how. There is some fear that my skills aren’t what I’d hoped they be after my transition over to the tech world. I did expect to become a high level individual contributor but there are many hard technical skills I would like to gain. Luckily, I am really, really good at planning. Now, it is time to just work the plan. Here is what I am doing –

1. A Cloud Guru – I purchased a yearly subscription that gives me access to their sandbox cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their courses. There’s so much here to explore and it will become really important in my certification training.
2. Udemy – I purchased quite a few classes during the Black Friday sale they had this past fall, and much of it is super helpful and should help me up-skill a lot.
3. Reading – I’ve put together quite the library here and I’m reading some really great books. I have books on data pipelines, Java, Python, databases and data lakes. There’s an absolute wealth of knowledge there.
4. Obsidian – You need  a place to bring it all together, and I am using Obsidian as my note taking service. This is helping me aggregate everything together and form a central place where I can build a knowledge cloud.
5. Podcasts – I listen to a lot of these really just so I can stay on top of the new terminology and know what is being talked about. I really like the Stack Overflow podcast, they seem to be the most knowledgeable.
6. YouTube – There are so many tutors on here that are willing to talk about what they do. Tech lessons aren’t always the best though but there are some great channels out there doing the good work because if sounded cool at the time, which is sad because the only people really getting paid on here are social media stars making fart noises while they play video games.
7. ChatGPT – I have this last but it should be first, this has been the absolute game changer for me. You no longer need a ton of foundational knowledge to learn something in tech. You can quickly get the definition of a technical term and some background on it. What was once esoteric is now easily accessible. I am a huge fan of it.

If this sounds untenable, it is important to note I have two college degrees so I am used to studying regiments. I am also a big believer in James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” and I can demonstrate the power of small, incremental improvements over long periods of time. One of the difficulties I am coming across is HOW MUCH technology’s changed in the last ten years.