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. ...

Ever wanted to share a Python script that uses external packages without making the recipient set up a virtual environment? With uv, you can embed dependencies directly in the script. The Command uv add --script example.py 'requests<3' 'rich' This adds inline metadata to your script: # /// script # dependencies = [ # "requests<3", # "rich", # ] # /// import requests from rich.pretty import pprint resp = requests.get("https://peps.python.org/api/peps.json") data = resp.json() pprint([(k, v["title"]) for k, v in data.items()][:10]) Running It Anyone with uv installed can now run the script directly: ...

I’ve committed to writing three blog posts a week and, to support this, I’ve been logging my ideas for posts in Obsidian. I’ve got the Tasks plugin installed, so I’ve set up a little system that is loosely based on the Jeff Goins three bucket writing system. To facilitate this, I’ve added a section to my daily note under a header called Writing. This doesn’t mean that I come up with ideas every day, but I want to have a spot where it’s easy to record the ideas when I get them and also remind myself to capture ideas when I’m in the daily note. ...

Today, I downloaded a community copy of dBeaver and installed it. Well technically I did this a while back, but today I opened it for the first time. I’ve been meaning to write about sql and relational databases for a while now. Some sort of beginner posts to help get people started. I’ve even started doing it once or twice, but it has fizzled out for all the typical reasons: ...