🧠 Protocol

As many hours as you can a day, a minimum of 2 hours a day of deep non distracted work.

• If you're having a hard time focusing on deep work, try the Pomodoro technique. I use it every day.
• Your phone is a massive distraction, your attention is currency, here are some steps you can take to minimize phone usage. At least put DND on your phone.

Keep a study journal.

• Use any app or paper that works for you.
• Don’t worry too much about structure here, this is for your own reflection. Have a space for notes.
• At the end of your study time for the day, give yourself 5 minutes to write in your journal a summary of what you learned, struggled with, resources you used, and what you will do the next day.

End each section with a project!

• Difficulty does not matter. Clarity and understanding do. A project is meant to prove your skills and to be references on your portfolio and resume.
• Put it on GitHub or better yet make it live.
• All Cloud Platforms have free credits when you sign up and plenty of services have free tiers. Use them. Setup budgets. Don’t be afraid to spend $20 or so a month learning. You'd easily spend that on Netflix so why not for learning?

End each project with documentation.

I've factored in 3 days for each phase for documentation purposes, use them.

• Create a blog post, LinkedIn Post, or YouTube video synthesizing what you’ve built with your news skills, challenges, resources you used, etc.
• Don’t try to come off as anything you aren’t. You are not an expert.
• Use your own style and voice. Authenticity and realness help land jobs too.
• This is why you keep a daily study journal. So, you can reference things to later write/talk about. Our minds are RAM, not storage.

📃 Instructions

1. Create a free account in any cloud platform.
   1. The best way to pick a platform is to go to LinkedIn jobs, indeed, or whatever jobs listing website you use, and see which one is asked for the most. Pick that one, stick with it. Do not focus on multi cloud.
2. Setup a learning budget in your cloud account
   1. $20 a month is more than enough.
3. Set up alerts at 25%, 50%, 75% consumption.
   1. Usually these aren't in real time so it's important to set them at different thresholds.
4. Create a blog or YouTube channel to document your learning.
5. Create a GitHub Account.
6. Sign up for a trial of GitHub Copilot
   1. AI assistants are here to stay, get hands on with them now.

📒 Study Plan

🐧 1. Bash

How you will interact with servers.

In your cloud account, deploy the cheapest Ubuntu VM possible. Use this for your studies. Turn it off after you’re done but also configure it to turn off at a the end of the day in case you forget.

Here is a free 2-hour course covering the basics of Bash.

2 weeks

• 10 Days studying and working in that Ubuntu VM.
• 4 Days writing scripts.

Project

• Build the capstone from LTC
• Create a GitHub repo and make sure your script is there.
• Make sure your repo README.md is well documented.

📞 2. Networking

How all machines talk to each other in the cloud.

Resources here

2 weeks

• 10 Days networking concepts.
• 4 Days building a project.

Project ideas

• Create a well-documented network architecture diagram and become familiar with diagraming tools.
  • Diagram and document a 2-tier architecture.
  • Diagram and document a 3-tier architecture.
  • Diagram and document a microservices architecture.
• Become familiar with the architecture center of your cloud platform.
  • Browse and find an example that interests you. Read it in and out. Look up any concepts you don't understand. Create a blog post/video explaining the architecture of your choice.

👩🏽‍💻 3. Programming, Git, and Prompt Engineering

The best programming language for Cloud Beginners.

You should’ve learned about variables, loops, and more programming concepts in the Bash section, build on that here.

5 weeks

1. 3 weeks learning Python.
   1. Work through the 7 days of Python project. Spend several days on each day. Go through each day, ask Copilot questions so you can gain deeper understanding.
2. 2 Weeks building a project.

Project:

• Build Capstone Project from LTC

☁️ 4. AWS/Azure/GCP

The Cloud Platform.

You should’ve picked up some cloud knowledge already but time to dive in deeper.

Resources here

6 weeks

• 4 Weeks Studying for an associate level certification.
• 2 Weeks building Cloud Resume Challenge (or any cloud project).

👷🏽‍♀️ 5. Terraform

The tool you will use to automate your infrastructure provisioning.

Resources here

2 weeks

• 1 Week Studying
• 1 Week building Infrastructure as Code files for any of your previous projects.

🐳 6. Docker

The tool you will use to make your applications portable.

Resources here

2 weeks

• 1 Week Studying
• 1 Week containerizing any of your previous projects.

⚒️ 7. GitHub Actions

The tool you will use to automate deployments of your applications.

Resources here

2 weeks

• 1 Week Studying
• 1 Week building CI/CD for any of your previous projects.