An Old Noob #8 - Building an Ansible Test Environment in AWS

Zachary Wilson — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:42:53 +0000

Normally i'd recreate my content from dev.to here, but this is a longer one with a lot of screenshots so a cross-post will have to do.

https://dev.to/zjgrey/an-old-noob-8-building-an-ansible-test-environment-in-aws-5djm

The Kramer Method

Zachary Wilson — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:03:12 +0000

I've been seeing a lot about the Seinfeld Method recently. I'm not sure why i'm seeing this more as this strategy is not entirely new, and it sounds like a fine way to gauge one's goal progress over time. The tl;dr is you get a large calendar, preferably one that displays all the days of year, and hang it in a predominant location in your abode. Something like this:

Then you focus on a goal and what it means to you to progress toward that goal, be it studying, coding, or in Seinfeld's case, writing. Keep the daily goal effective but reasonable to accomplish every day - think 10 pushups, 30-60 minutes of study, whatever fits your idea of progress for your goal. Then, when you've completed that for the day, place a big fat red X over the date. Do that again tomorrow. Make it a habit and "don't break the chain" of X's on your calendar.

It sounds like a solid plan for someone to make progress on any goal really. I have one issue with this method however...

I don't have one goal running at a time. Quite the contrary, the older i get, the more goals i stack. Today while pondering this i started listing everything i currently have running right now as "goals" in my life, including personal and professional. I'm talking things that i actively, daily (or at least most days) pursue with an end goal in mind and that i spend at least 20 minutes a day practicing. I'm hovering right around 9-12 depending on the day.

Some examples include exercise, meditation, studying for certifications (currently AWS CCP), learning new technologies (working through the Udemy Ansible course now), reading (3 books at the moment with 78 on my to-read list)...

I suddenly wondered if there might be something very wrong with me.

Then i started thinking more about that guy across the hall. Granted, Cosmo Kramer is a fictional character, yet he began to resonate with me in this context. It seemed in every show he was doing something completely different, from playing rounds with golf pros to installing a garbage disposal in his shower to swimming the East River. This is someone who literally bounces off walls. On the surface he looks aloof at best and hopelessly scattered at worst. I can relate.

But Kramer embraces his quirks. He chases his dreams regardless of what his friends think. If he had a calendar for all his goals, they'd cover the walls of his apartment and probably be covered in a plethora of rainbow hues.

And he's usually a pretty happy guy. Wound a little tight perhaps... but more at peace with himself than the other regulars on the show.

So yeah, i bounce between personal projects daily. I've got probably a hundred hours of project work on my backlog. I've got progress log spreadsheets, daily reminders, Outlook tasks, and Todoist just full of things i'm actively working. I've got a 29-week streak of at least 3 labs/week on Immersive Labs. I'm working my way through The Phoenix Project. I'm about to build my first Ansible playbooks. I'm weeks away from taking my CCP exam.

I'm just not a single calendar kind of guy. Sometimes i wonder what that's like. But that's the beauty of DevSecOps after all: there's never a shortage of new things to learn, and while i'm committed to finishing that which i start, i simply can't not want to learn so much more.

So new things arise, as they should. New things go on my backlog, as they should. I keep plugging away at everything i've chosen to put on my plate, as i should. And i'll look to the master of multitasking for my project management mentoring needs =]

An intro on why i'm here (and look lost)

Zachary Wilson — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:38:20 +0000

Hi all - i started writing on Dev.to a couple months back and now i've been invited to join this community, so thanks and welcome!

I began publishing as a requirement of the Cloud Resume Challenge which is a fantastic strategy for learning about public cloud services by getting your hands dirty, and i highly recommend it. By now i've published my resume site and added a few of my own integrations and additions, but to start at the beginning one must start at the beginning.

Here is my first post from almost 2 months ago. I hope it makes a decent introduction to this new community =]

The Ops Community ⚙️: Zachary Wilson

An Old Noob #8 - Building an Ansible Test Environment in AWS

The Kramer Method

An intro on why i'm here (and look lost)