This morning I woke up early and drove over to the Pearson Vue testing center early. It is a Friday, but I took the day off from work to take take the AWS Data Engineer Associate Certification Test. I took it for the second time today. Clearly I did not pass the test the first time. I don’t know at this point if I’ve passed the test this time, or not. In my experience it generally takes until the end of the day to receive the results of an AWS certification test. I took the test this morning at 8 am and an finished around 2 hours later. Now it’s almost 1 in the afternoon and I’ve had a little time to think about my experience. ...

I recently posted that I took and failed the AWS Data Engineer Associate Certification test on May 9th. I also posted about my experience on Linked In. The post was not the typical certificate of achievement. I failed the test. But the support that I received from the Linked In community was overwhelming, thank you. Thank you all of your support! A good number of you reminded me that failure is only a failure if you quit, otherwise it is feedback. This is great advice and I have taken it to heart. I have scheduled a re-take of the certification test on June 20th. ...

I’ve been wanting to learn more about artificial intelligence and in particular agentic AI. This past week I started a training on udemy called The complete Agentic AI Engineering Course by Ed Donner and Ligency Team. The class is that it doesn’t tout itself as a “Learn everything about agentic AI in 30 Days” or “4 hours to AI Engineer”. Those types of titles typically indicate that the training is either very high level or filled with fluff (sometimes both). ...

Yesterday, I mentioned took the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification exam. Honestly, I felt pretty good about it after taking it. Leading up to the exam, I was unsure and had practice tests telling me once day that I would pass and the next day that I would fail. It left me in a place where I was unsure about my readiness to take the test. The morning of the test and the day before, I passed practice exams with a score of 80% and I felt pretty good. I also discovered an oddity in one of the third-party practice exams that I took. The same question appeared twice in the instance of the exam that I took, but with different answers each time. ...

Today I joined the AWS Card Clash: Gen AI Battles | S1 E1 | Model Access Showdown on LinkedIn. This session demoed the AWS Card Clash learning game available on AWS SkillBuilder. The session was hosted by Curtis Morton, Jason Cuddy, and Brittany Wolfrom. AWS Card Clash is a fun and engaging card game that pits two players against each other to complete architecture diagrams. Some of the things that I liked about this as a learning activity are: ...

Recently I posted about how [[I take the AWS Data Engineer - Associate exam in 5 days]]. My concern is that even though I’ve been studying for a couple months now, when I take some practice exams I am failing. These failures impact my confidence in my ability to pass the exam this Friday. Since this post, I’ve continued to practice my failed answers using flashcards. I’ve also been taking a new practice exam daily. ...

A bold reboot I’m setting out on this journey, again, to become a better writer, learn, and hopefully help others along the way.

A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted to know more about AWS Glue and other related AWS data services. I have the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification, and it made sense that in order to learn AWS Data Engineering, I would attempt the related AWS Associate (DEA-C01) Certification. AWS Certifications are fairly straightforward, you study, register to take the exam, pay the fee, and then on the day you go to the test site and take the exam. ...

A couple weekends ago, I was lucky enough to attend PyTexas 2025. It’s a great regional conference that is a great mix of world class speakers and cozy relaxed atmosphere. It’s in spring, on the banks of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. It is a wonderful event. At the conference, the organizers periodically raffled off items from a ‘prize trough’. The prize trough was a wagon filled with technical books. There were many great titles in there including The Pragmatic Programmer, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, and The Missing README, among others. ...

In the previous post, we installed dBeaver and created a sample database. Now let’s explore what’s inside. Installing dBeaver allows you to generate a sample database. This is nice because it lets you work with data right away. To work with the sample database you will need to install SQLite drivers. Once the drivers are installed, you can see the tables and other attributes of the database. ...