Career

If you’re applying to hundreds of jobs and hearing nothing back, it probably isn’t you. The way the funnel is set up works against you. Big companies dominate job boards like LinkedIn partly because they pay for placement. A single listing at a well-known corporation can pull over a thousand applications, and a lot of them get auto-filtered before a person ever looks. Even a strong resume struggles to surface in that volume, especially for roles that often get filled internally or through referrals before the public pile is touched. ...

As a web engineer doing full-stack work, I’ve spent years inside the AWS ecosystem. EC2, DynamoDB, Redis, Lambda, API Gateway, and S3 are part of my daily toolkit. I was comfortable building and deploying on them, but I also knew there was a lot of AWS I’d never touched and a lot of architectural reasoning I’d never had to do explicitly. So this year I set myself a goal at work: pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam. I wanted to go deeper on the services I only knew at the surface and get better at designing whole systems rather than wiring up the parts I already knew. I passed the SAA-C03 on my first attempt with a score of 903/1000, and this is the plan that got me there over about nine months. ...