On The Desire To Change Career
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On The Desire To Change Career

Byrichard

If I had been smart I would have changed career path around 2006-2007 when I was in London surrounded by entrepreneurs and web developers, rather than now during a pandemic. Normally I struggle to find new contracts because of two things. The first is that for camera and editing work there are very few opportunities per year, and the opportunities that do arise have hundreds, if not thousands of candidates so the probability of success is low. The other issue is that because there are few jobs, if you fail you may have to wait months for an opportunity to appear.


That’s why I have spent the entirety of the pandemic reskilling. Every single day I study web development. I have gone from IT support courses, to CSS to HTML, to Javascript to frameworks and back to JavaScript. The journey is long and hard. When I was finally free to study Angular in depth I found that my knowledge of Javascript was not deep enough, so I went back and studied on JS pathway, and now I am studying a second one on Linkedin Learning. My goal is to be proficient. This isn’t a one day goal. This is a journey.


You can follow my journey on github to see what I am learning. One of my side projects, to practice what I have learned is this one. At the moment it is a simple app that retrieves a random image from my instagram gallery and displays it with its title. This self-project is worthwhile because it is easy to follow a course and code along with the teacher. The problem with this is that when there is no teacher, and no model you need to innovate and find your own solutions.


Last year when I tried something similar I found a way to convert from Json to CSV to bring it into Wordpress. Now I am working with Fetch, random number generators to find a post, let to be within the scope of one block, converting epoch time to human readable date and time, and more. If I followed instructions I would find it easy to do, but I couldn’t find any, so I am experimenting with ideas from courses. The next step is to find how to use classes and ids’ to embellish it with CSS.


I started with the random post generator. The next steps will be to use constructors, for each loops, display ten posts at a time, but also to enable finding them by year and month. I can also add more metadata fields than I can with Instagram. I could add country, type of landscape and more. I can practice building a CMS from the ground up. In letters of motivation I wrote about learning about Media Asset management tools from the ground up, and now out of curiousity, that is what I am doing.


It has taken a while to understand how Javascript works, but now that I have I can spend more time experimenting and learning each day. My increasing proficiency will be shown through the projects I build in courses, but also the self-led project.


Sometimes I add comments to commits, to explain what I found hard, and then I show the code that resolved the issue. If you’re curious as to why I would use a self-hosted json file and media files the answer is simple. I don’t need to go through the process of asking for permission to acccess an api to access my own data. For an example of working with ajax and json you can refer to this project.


And Finally


When you work in the media and broadcasting you constantly need to look for opportunities, to face rejection, and continue looking. With the skills I am learning now people are already interested, and that is the reason to change from skills that are less interesting, to those that are.

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Thoughts on The Google IT Support Course

Byrichard

I am currently studying the Google IT Support Course. I am familiar with many of the topics and I have used many of the tools discussed. What the course offers, and the reason for which it has so much value, is that fills my knowledge gaps.


One example of this is the TCP/IP model. Until I studied the networking module I never thought about the five layers. I never thought about the complexity of getting packets from one machine on one network to another machine three or more hops across on another network.


Before I studied this course I was familiar with adding an IP address and Gateway address but did not understand how subnetting works. In the process I learned to count in binary. It is a simple concept to understand once you have played with examples a number of times.


One of the strengths of this course is that it tests you at the end of the chapter to ensure that you remember what you learned. In some cases it took more than three attempts to pass certain quizzes and I had to wait twenty four hours before I could continue. I like that there are these challenges. It encourages you to do some background research to ensure that you understand the topics that are making you struggle.


I also like the practical tests where you have to either SSH or RDP into remote clients and accomplish tasks using what you have just learned. You can fail here too, and that is where you invest more time in ensuring that you have really learned the topic.


One exercise I liked is SSHing into a test server, fixing a file name, checking that the page loaded, and then SSHing into the production server and doing the same. I had often seen SSH mentioned but until recently I had not had the curiousity to accomplish tasks with it.


On Linkedin Learning I studied AWS Provisioning And Deploying before I took the Google IT Support Course and I was able to get through the course and understand most of the concepts and tasks, but the Google IT support Course really added to my knowledge and understanding of the entire workflow and environment.


Yesterday I was learning about the opportunity to record actions in terminal and if I had known about this earlier then I could have written scripts to deploy and breakdown instances that I was required to install for projects.


When studying web development I had to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, NPM, Angular, React and more and they sometimes interfered with each other. If I had the knowledge I have now then I could have had a clean install for each, and I could have configured and used virtual machines.


I started the course with knowledge of how to use computers. Now my knowledge is well founded, with many of the gaps in knowledge and understanding filled.