The first post of 2020 should have been done well before April.

The past six months have been chaotic. I’ve brought most of it on myself but I still reassure myself that there’s method in my madness.

Elasticsearch training material

I have been planning some training material for Elasticsearch since I started this blog last year. One post - a high-level overview of Elasticsearch’s architecture - has been languishing as a draft since late October.

There are many ways to deliver training material. Personally, I like different media for different scenarios.

Videos are great as a primer and can get you up and running quickly. To really pick a topic apart to truely understand it, however, I prefer reading documentation, running experiments and solving real issues.

I am going to try and balance those two aspects in the future but I will be delivering some video material to try and gauge the reaction. This will almost certainly be on YouTube.

Detailed, in-depth analysis of individual features will probably be on this blog.

Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

As part of enabling people to build a lab for training, I wanted to create an Elasticsearch lab environment in the cloud. I quickly became frustrated with muddling through videos, blog posts and AWS docs so looked for something more structured. Certifications form a good learning path for getting up to speed with new technologies and I committed to passing the CSAA exam.

Using the course on Linux Academy and practice exams by Jon Bonso on Udemy I passed the exam in February.

As an aside, Adrian Cantrill - the author of the CSAA course on Linux Academy - has now left and is building out his own video series for the updated version of the exam. Would recommend!

I was all set to build out the cloud-based lab but then…

Now contracting

A few days before the AWS exam, I took an opportunity to resign my permanent role and enter the contracting world. I started a new role this week as an Elasticsearch Engineer.

Onward…

Once the dust settles a little, I’ll be posting more regularly (and frequently!).