And WHO am I?
Good questions. Really, I’m a learner just like you. Those senior engineer types established in the industry say people like me are “collecting certifications”, but dude…they get you the interview when you don’t have the experience. And when I study for them, I learn new things that I’m applying in my role. With that being said, I’m against gatekeeping knowledge. I’m all about creating a more equal and fair tech space, especially for Black and Latino communities. Cloud-native technologies—like Kubernetes and containers—offer a huge opportunity to level the playing field since many higher-ed schools haven’t caught up, even though businesses are rapidly adopting them. My mission is to see more Latin American cloud, platform, and DevOps engineers stepping up, and to open doors for Black engineers from underserved areas in the US. We need to give our kids in these communities more options.
A little background on me: My journey started in 2020 when I was teaching myself everything I could. But, like Charlie Kelly and the Pepe Silvia mystery, I realized I needed formal training in networking and cloud basics to really make sense of everything. Over the years, I’ve built on what I learned, step by step—starting from static sites on object storage to deploying them in Docker containers on VMs.
I’ve stayed vendor-agnostic because I value freedom. No one company is going to take all my stimmy money. I want to be able to take my ball and play elsewhere if I feel like it, and knowledge has allowed me to do just that.
kubectl get knowledge --all-vendors
For example, the main site, CloudFi, runs on a single Kubernetes node, with the Code on Github and DockerHub backing up my images. I bootstrapped Argo CD to automatically detect repo changes, update the image, and redeploy the cluster, while also self managing, with horizontal autoscaling ready to handle surges. It’s my way of showing how far I’ve come in this journey. And I know that for the type of people I’m trying to reach out to that all just sounded like a bunch of Harry Potter expecto patronus junk. But in time it’ll make sense. It’s ok. I made a series of children’s books for everyone that simplifies the concepts. They started out because my daughter asked what I worked on at work, and explaining cloud computing was too complex, and saying computers was too reductive. Believe or not this was the easiest way for me to explain this to her. And she loves them. Two of the books (More to come) are free to download on my GitHub. Which segways into my next point….
AI has also been a passion, and I’ve created my own Custom GPT Instance to help small and medium enterprises determine if Kubernetes is right for them. I even use AWS Polly and Google TTS with custom lexicons to narrate study notes over Lofi hip-hop beats—a blend of tech and creativity that’s become a lifelong hobby. Use AI, everyone. It’s the only way you’ll be able to stay on an even keel moving forward.
Well, I hope I help you learn. I hope the study crams help you memorize concepts and tie things together. They’re not meant to be the full study course, after all. I’ll be posting tutorials of what I’ve done for you here so you can try it out. Check the links at the bottom of the page to see what I’m cooking on GitHub.
Peace
