#158 From Gas Station to Google with Self-Taught Cloud Engineer Rishab Kumar
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If I was going to start from zero, where I have zero context, is I was going to learn some of the IT fundamentals on how networking works. So how internet works, first of all, DNS, how packets transfer, how computers communicate to each other. Because at the end of the day, all these servers within the cloud, they use networking to talk to each other.

The second skill I would really spend my time is on how Linux works. Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. This week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, bass, guitar, and keys. We're going back to 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System classic DuckTales theme from The Moon.

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Welcome back to the Free Code Camp Podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreeCodeCamp.org. Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. This week, we're talking with Rishabh Kumar. He's a cloud engineer and developer advocate at Twilio. Rishabh grew up in India and moved to Canada for school four years ago.

But he couldn't afford to finish. He resorted to delivering pizzas and working at a gas station, but he worked hard to teach himself how to code using websites like freecodecamp.org and how to build cloud infrastructure, and eventually he got a job at Google.

Before we talk to Rishabh, support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com.

Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support Free Code Camp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to freecodecamp.org slash donate.

Rishabh, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Quincy. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your many contributions to the Free Code Camp community, which we'll talk about later. But first, I want to talk a little bit about what cloud engineering is for people who are uninitiated. Before we get into your backstory, which is fantastic, like Hero's Journey, what exactly is cloud engineering?

Okay, so my understanding of it is that cloud engineers are IT professionals. Like it's a segment within IT where people design, build, and architect on cloud. So cloud, if you don't know what it is, it's basically someone else's computer.

There are a lot of public clouds available right now. So think of Amazon, AWS, Google's TCP, and Microsoft's Azure. So basically you're renting out compute from these vendors instead of buying compute, like having your own servers. So anything in regards to cloud, whether it's designing, building, or architecting on top of it is called cloud engineering. Okay.

Yeah, and so that's the specialization you've gone down as a more generalist dev. You've gotten into cloud engineering, and often you'll hear the term DevOps. Would you consider it basically the same as DevOps? DevOps kind of maybe predates the full move to the cloud, but nowadays...

Almost everybody's using the cloud, right? Yeah. Like FreeCoke, we have more than 100 cloud servers around the world, so we can have really good uptime, and we can have various services available in various places and all that. And low, not just uptime. We're very proud of our 99.99% uptime.

but four nines. It's not six nines like Amazon would have necessarily, but also of course just latency and stuff like that. Like making sure that like people who are in Punjab,

where you grew up, have fast access to Free Code Camp and making sure people in Nairobi have fast access, people who are in Buenos Aires, various parts of the world, that they have a good connection and that they can quickly access learning resources. So you've built a career around this, and I'm very excited to get into your backstory. What pushed you in the direction specifically of cloud engineering versus more general software engineering? Yeah.

That is a really good question. I'm trying to go back to like the 18, 19-year-old me of what was going on in my head. I think so I got into tech by doing tech support. So tech support or IT help desk was my first role. So I was doing tech support for a SaaS company and was helping customers with –

The issues varied from being product issues to sometimes networking issue or OS specific issues. So the amount of things you learn, like you need to have like a, you wear multiple hats because sometimes you're running command line tools to figure out why this particular port is not working or is not open. And the other times it's basically permission issues on the OS level and

And during that time, I found out how our SaaS, which I was supporting, was using AWS because one of the tickets needed escalation. I needed access to our database. And that's when the flow was that I escalated to a cloud engineer who will grant me access to run a specific SQL statement.

I'm like, interesting. Like, I don't know what AWS, like I've heard the term, but I don't know what it really is. And that's when this specific engineer started explaining to me. It's like, oh, we have our servers. It's basically we are renting servers from them. And I'm like, oh, very interesting. So I definitely was always fascinated with like server administration, server management, and Linux had a really, you know, soft spot in my heart.

And I loved networking aspects of it too. Talking about like general IT back in 2015, 16. Yeah. And I'm like, this is really cool that you don't have to have servers on-prem. You can just rent them out. So that got me interested. And like, there was a spark. I'm like, I need to learn about this more. And that's when I started like asking this cloud engineering team more questions. Like, oh, okay. Yeah.

They were very kind to take me to a regional conference in Toronto. Oh, wow. They took you to a conference? Yeah. These people are super chill. Like...

I talk to a lot of devs and they're kind of almost afraid of IT people. They're like, oh, don't screw up my computer somehow with some weird software that the company needs to install in there, right? I have this one anecdote of a person who's literally like, whenever IT's coming by, they'll figure out an excuse to be out of the office so they don't have to interact with them. Oh my God.

I'm sad that's the notion, but no, I consider myself very fortunate that I had people who I could really rely on when it came to mentorship stuff. Yeah.

So even before they took me to the conference, at this point, I was six, seven months in tech support. And I was like, I don't want to do tech support for my entire career. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was just not me. I'm like, I want to do something more. So I asked for advice and they're like, if you don't know what you want to do yet,

Maybe shadow different roles that we have at the company. And that's what I did. I shadowed software engineers for a week. They had like a front end and a back end team. I'm like, no. After a week, I was like, no, this is not for me. Then I shadowed QA engineers for a week. I realized you need a lot of experience to be a QA engineer, specifically when the QA team is very small. Yeah.

And then the last team that I had to shadow was the cloud engineering team. These were the all three engineering teams they had, or sub-teams within the engineering department. And the cloud, again, I was kind of biased previously too.

I shadowed them like a lot of this makes sense. I have a lot of transferable skills. Instead of managing servers on-prem, I'll be doing it on the cloud. The only gap is like learning terminology that AWS or Azure or GCP uses. Apart from that, everything else makes sense.

And that's when, after that week, they're like, oh, we have a spare ticket to this conference about cloud. Would you like to go? And I'm like, sure. If the expenses are covered, why not? I went to the conference and saw all these passionate people talking about cloud. I'm like, this is serious. I can pursue this as a career. And I think going to that conference, talking to people,

A lot of people outside of my company made me realize, okay, I need to... Now is the time to make this change. And this was late 2018. Okay. So we're going to rewind and talk a little bit more about your career in a second. But do you think that the cloud engineering roles like DevOps, that that field is...

Do you think it has a bright future or do you think a lot of it's going to be automated or consolidated? What is your take on whether people should be getting into cloud in 2025? Great question. I think cloud is...

You know, there is a term I heard about like how every company is a data company now because the amount of data we have. I think that is also true for cloud. So like every company right now is a cloud company because in some way or form you're using cloud computing, whether it's through SaaS, like using Gmail. Software as a service. Software as a service, whether it's through platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. And with the rise in like...

like all the AI stuff that we are seeing, I think the need for having compute that can handle workloads for AI and LLMs, I think it's only going to increase. Of course, the use case is different now, but if you find a balance between how you can, you know,

be proficient in how AI and machine learning and LLMs use compute and then kind of have that in the skill set along with cloud skills. I think that would be my advice. But yeah, cloud is definitely here to stay and it'll be...

What you just said makes a lot of sense to me because like quantum computing, for example, let's say hypothetically that does get traction. Right now it's more speculative. But you're not going to actually want to have a quantum computer. You're going to want to rent access to it because it's going to cost a fortune to maintain those things. Similarly, if you're doing machine learning, you're training your own model. You're not going to want to buy a whole bunch of super expensive graphic cards and build your own. That would be...

Yeah.

of really anything in my opinion. And I, I definitely, a lot of critics of cloud engineering and stuff. They're just like, just buy your own server and put it on a rack and like use, you know, uh, put it, put it in like rack space or something like that. There are lots of companies where you basically just bring your own hardware and you put it in their data centers. Yeah. Um, and I definitely hear you like the, using the cloud is expensive and, uh, but,

If you want to have really good uptime and you don't want to have to worry about like some power outage or some flood or some, any number of things that you want it to be somebody else's problem. And also if you have unpredictable demand scanning or things like that, like there's so many reasons to embrace the more expensive, but more convenient and more robust option of just, you know, using cloud servers. And of course, like you've got Google, you've got of course,

Amazon, AWS, you've got even companies like DigitalOcean and places like that that have options. And then there's so many different vendors you can choose from, and you can even go multi-cloud and distribute your servers across a whole bunch of different clouds to further mitigate risk and things like that. And

It is a truly deep skill going into cloud engineering. So my impression from talking to a lot of cloud engineers and DevOps over the years is that it's going to get more and more complicated, and the tooling won't necessarily keep up with the changes in the rigors of what you actually have to know how to do and what you're doing day to day. And there's only so much that can be automated when things are changing rapidly and you have completely different types of compute coming online. Like, for example, you taught...

a Langchain LLM development course, for example. And you're a cloud engineer who's dipping their toes into machine learning and teaching those concepts. And you've also taught a very popular course on Terraform and deploying websites to Google Cloud using Terraform. And so I'm going to be linking to both of these courses in the description if you want to benefit from some of Rishabh's expertise. Where I want to go now is...

for those people that are sitting in a gas station, listening to this, you know, handing people, you know, like checking people out and stuff, uh, going in and, you know, making sure the bathroom's clean. It hasn't flooded or something like that. Like I've worked a lot of retail jobs. I worked at like a grocery store for a couple of years. I worked at a Taco Bell, uh,

like a year or two. Uh, you know, I know that it kind of sucks that the movie clerks is very accurate in terms of just sitting around waiting for people dealing with customers and stuff like that. And, um, and that was a big part of your life after you, uh, had to drop out for economic reasons from university. Let's,

I'm not going to go all the way back because I grew up in Punjab. You studied at pretty good public schools. Your dad is an engineer. He's somebody who values education. So you went to good schools in Punjab and then you immigrated to Canada. Mm-hmm.

And that is an excellent place. That country is very receptive to smart people coming over and living there. So I want you to take me back to that moment. We can skip a lot of the childhood and jump forward to you arriving as an Indian-Canadian, or soon-to-be Indian-Canadian. What was that like, those first few years in Canada? For sure. I think...

Did the, the personality that I have developed, mind you, I was 17 when I migrated here, almost 18. Um, and I think the, the values and personality that I've developed and what I am today is, it is a lot of what I've gone through in those two, two and a half years, as soon as I moved here. Um,

I don't regret any of it. I just want to preface that, like, even though there were challenges, struggles, and I'm so glad I had to go through them because that's what made the Rishabh that I am today. The thought process, I think, like, when I am trying to go back to that time and see how, what Rishabh at that time was thinking and what was going on in his, on his mind, like,

Studies, at least for the first semesters, first semester was not. Because I went to a college, so I did a two-year diploma in Canada instead of a four-year degree. Studies were not my priority, at least for the first semester. The reason being, I realized that, oh, I got a job at a gas station, I was doing night shifts, and in the day I was going to the college, but...

For a 17-year-old kid, when you realize that you're making $10, $11 an hour, it's very simple math. Like, oh, the more amount of hours I put in, the more amount of money I'm going to make. So I think that kind of got to my head and I prioritized work over studies until the first semester ended. I got my results and the GPA didn't look good. And I'm like, oh, whatever.

And also, like, as you said, like, my dad really, you know, values good education. And he's like, I know you're not doing a degree, but I want you to take this seriously because I don't want you to be stuck at a gas station. Not like there's nothing bad, but I think of it from a perspective of a father who wants his son to succeed in life. Yeah.

And that really hit me. And I'm like, yeah, like all this hard work that he did so that we could have like a, you know, comfortable life will be down the drain if I don't take full advantage of it. So try to like prioritize studies. And like, I was still working. I worked at a gas station for two and a half years, but I look, I took like, I did lesser shifts and started prioritizing studies over it. And like,

I saw the results and I also like, it became really interesting. I think second semester we had intro to networking. We had intro to operating system and intro to Linux. Um, so it was very like interesting for me. I'm like, Oh, this is how the tech works underneath because a good thing about college or universities is they go really deep. Um,

in, you know, understanding how the technology works, whether it's the day-to-day computer user to like how TCP three-way handshake works. Like it just fascinated me so much. And I was very curious. I've been very curious throughout my life. I think like curiosity is one of the really good traits that I like about myself. It's like, I get curious and then go down a rabbit hole of researching through that.

And yeah, that's how the next three semesters went. I was able to land a co-op opportunity. So co-op is basically like internships, but for college, like community college and stuff. They're unpaid. They're part of your diploma, basically, so that you're industry ready. So in order to get your diploma...

from the college, you have to do a two-month co-op or internship. And I did that as an IT admin, like a junior IT admin at a company called Printfleet. And I'm so glad I did that because I even loved it more than my education. I'm like, oh, this is how you apply all the knowledge you have gained.

And I killed it in my internship. They were really happy that I took initiative. A few of the projects, they were not even projects until I initiated them at this company. So they were really happy with my willingness to work and how passionate I was about IT. So they were like, oh, we don't have an IT admin role open, but would you be willing to do tech support for the SaaS? Yeah.

And I'm like, at this point, anything is better than gas station and delivering pizzas. So sure. And then that's when I realized the salary they were offering was definitely more than what I was making at a gas station. So that was the added bonus to it. And that's how I started my tech support role, basically. So to recap, you kind of like hit a plateau where you felt comfortable. You're making good money working at the gas station. It's not like...

Working in those types of jobs, it's not like completely taking all your brain power. You can still think about things. You can read. You can listen to music potentially. You can do lots of things. So it's kind of like a fun job, but the compensation is much lower. But back then, of course, before the inflation we've experienced, $10, $11 an hour wasn't that bad. I mean that was enough to have money to go out and have a good time and stuff. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, like I was –

able to like also help with like some of the tuition that was left even at 10 and 11 dollars and I was living comfortably like you know rent living expenses and stuff so yeah definitely I was like getting in that comfort zone of like oh this is gonna work out yeah

Well, and it was kind of your ancestral duty. Your father worked very hard to provide this opportunity for you, and you would need to do something similar for your family down the road, and also your natural curiosity. So once you got that curiosity going, and once you actually genuinely got interested in computers, it sounds like

your curiosity just carried you the rest of the way. Even on the job, going out and finding exciting projects that hadn't been started and starting them just to continue to expand your learning and your experience. And it sounds like you made excellent use of the opportunity you were given through that internship. And also the humility to not necessarily take a higher level position, but just take whatever work was available. It was still a step up from working at a gas station. And it sounds like you recognized those opportunities and you didn't like...

shop around. He just took the one right in front of you and started getting to work, which I think there's some merit to that in this situation. So, um,

Let's fast forward a little bit to you're getting into your career. You talked about getting into cloud engineering from IT and just having some champions within your own company who, like, first of all, your company sounds super chill. The fact that they let you shop around and figure out what specialization you wanted to go into, they clearly saw promise in you and they wanted to nurture that. And I think so many companies just...

will, uh, the, when they need somebody new, they'll go and hire somebody completely new. They don't necessarily invest in the people they already have. And I think that's a big mistake managers make. And I'm a manager and like, I always want to build up and train and cross train and, uh, you know, have people pivot between roles and things like that. And I think that's great. And you've been able to pivot between roles. Yeah.

And this is a testament not only to your own ability but to the flexibility and the wisdom of your employers. So shout out to them. So you were able to transition into cloud engineering as a result of doing this conference and then just learning. How did the transition happen? How did that pivot happen? Yeah.

Yeah, so got back from the conference and I remember sitting in the cloud operations manager office. She had an office and I was talking to her. I'm like, I'm serious about this. I want to transition to cloud. And as you said, like, shout out to them. They were very supportive. And she's like, OK, I have this.

we primarily use AWS. So I'm going to like, you don't have to like that decision is kind of made for you. If you want to transition here, you'll have to be skilled in AWS as a cloud provider. I'm like, cool. She gave me a roadmap. So like, she's like study for cloud practitioner. That's going to get you up to speed with all the cloud terminology, you know, like infrastructure as service, software service. I didn't know what all these terms meant. Um,

costs, like how billing works and stuff like that. CapEx, which is capital expenditure to OpEx, which is operational expenditures. A lot of terms. And I'm like, okay, this is going to take time. And she's like, yeah, yeah, take your time. Go through the cloud practitioner material. If you want to sit the exam, sit the exam. But also like build projects, like get hands-on. It's not just theoretical. I'm like, okay.

So after I got the roadmap, she also gave me some books that they already had that I could study from. She invited me to the team meeting. So this is pre-COVID. We were in office five days a week.

They had a team meeting every week and I was invited to those, even though I'm just, you know, a tech support person. That's pretty cool. So they were like grooming you to ascend essentially and making sure that you had sufficient contacts and everything like that, even though you were still studying to earn these certifications. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was very valuable because that just kind of showed me how this team worked. What are the problems that they are facing and,

Not at the beginning, but later, like down four or five months, I was able to kind of map it in my head that how I can come on this team and help them. I think if you have that kind of mindset, it's very easy to market yourself to be part of a new job that you're applying for or to be part of an existing team that is in your company.

So it took me five months, five to six months to like clear, not just clear the examination. So the cloud practitioner certification from AWS, but also to have like, I had two projects that I built and also how AWS was being utilized at this company. I knew it to like very deep extent on how every service is being used by the SaaS community.

And that's when, and at this point it was a year into the tech support role. There was an opening for a cloud engineer role for within the same team. And before applying to it, like, of course I asked my manager who, um, like the tech support manager is like, yep, you have been like putting in the extra time for like last six months. You have been shadowing them. Like, uh, I know about your intentions. So you're good to like lead, um, onto this path. Um,

Then, even before applying, I asked all the cloud engineers within that team, "Hey, do you think I should apply for this role? I don't know if you're looking for someone senior."

And they're like, no, we are ready to put in the word for you if it comes down to that. Wow, you did the groundwork, man. You totally laid out the groundwork. The fact that you got the blessing of your current boss and you talked to everybody, like this is textbook how to do a pivot job. I mean, like I really can't think of a better scenario. You're working alongside both of these teams and you're gaining the respect of everybody involved.

And, of course, your IT manager probably wants to keep you ideally, but they can't hold you back from your destiny, which is to become a specialist in cloud development. And they see the writing on the wall that you're ready and that you are going to eventually move on, and they don't try to clip your wings or hold you back or anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So shout out to them. Yeah, shout out to them. Yeah.

And that's when I applied after I got the blessing. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to shoot my shot. At this point, so previously we were a small company. We were 38 people, entire company.

three people on the cloud team. During somewhere this time, we got acquired by an enterprise from the US and we went from 38 people company to being 2,500. What? Yeah. And that is why... Oh, because you were a subsidiary. The team didn't grow that much. Okay, but you now are part of a much larger hierarchy. Yes. And they have their own... They brought in their own management team

So one of the challenges I had is the interview was going to be with this new, you know, management team and leadership team, which they didn't know anything about. They had like zero context on what I have been doing.

My resume had only experience from like tech support, but a shout out to the cloud engineering team that I did shadow. They were like able to vouch in. They're like, no, you should definitely, you know, I know we have like three, they had three external candidates who were like a solid candidates with experience and stuff. But they really vouched for me to be like, let's just have him for the interview. I knew my selling point was huge.

Telling them that I know the SaaS inside out and how we use AWS. External candidates, at this point, they don't know how AWS is being utilized here. So I just tried to stick to that. And I'm glad I did. We had like a 45-minute discussion on the architecture pattern that we use and the...

He was the director of engineering, and he was really impressed. He was like, you'll probably hear back by end of this week. I was very nervous until I saw the email that you were in, because to me, you feel like an imposter because you have these...

People that you're competing against who are, I know specifically there was one individual that had eight years of cloud experience. Wow. That's some stiff competition. And several of them probably had university degrees too. Yes.

Which you did not have. So, I mean, regardless of what people say, managers will say, oh, we don't really care about degrees. But that is definitely weighted in favor of the candidates who have university degrees. They're just seen as less risky. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good filter, I guess, when it comes to hiring. But the other...

upper hand I had is they don't have to pay me as much as they would have to pay someone with a university degree and eight years of experience. For me, if you give me a significant jump from what I was making in tech support, I'm going to be happy. And that's what happened is they gave me like a good jump from what I was making in tech support. I was

To this day, I remember, even though I have progressed through my career pretty decently, like salary-wise and compensation-wise, I have never felt that happy. Like that was, I still remember how I felt seeing that offer letter and the jump from like making tech support salary to cloud engineer salary. Even now when I look back, it was not,

to the market standards, it was not that much, but I also know what value I brought. Like, you know, I didn't have a cloud experience as like, if you consider professional experience and they were just taking a chance on me to see how he will do. But yeah, that's how, that's how I transitioned. Yeah. Yeah.

What certifications did you ultimately earn as a cloud? Like, I'm just curious if you can list some of the certifications you have currently or like have had. You may not necessarily keep them current. They generally expire after three years. But like the vendor certifications, any more general certifications, people who are in IT may be thinking or people who just want to work in cloud engineering who aren't even working in tech. Or if you're a software engineer and you want to transition into cloud engineering, like

What certifications have you earned and what would you recommend? So that's a two-part question, I guess. Which ones have you earned over the course of your career? So the very first certification that I did is funnily, not even funnily, but it's the Free Code Camp Responsive Web Design. The reason why I did, and this was during my tech support time, is I did do Intro to HTML and JavaScript in my two-year diploma program.

But I wanted to build like a website as a project for my transition to cloud engineering. And I wanted to host that in AWS, but I didn't know how to build a website apart from like a simple HTML page. So I did the responsive web design from FreeCodeCamp. I loved it. Like that blew my mind that resources like this exist for free. And that is for like a, you know,

18-year-old kid who paid huge amounts of tuition to a college. So when I realized that, I'm like, oh, this is so cool because it was so practical, you know, because you had assignments at the end where you build projects apart from the live coding challenge that you do every day. Like at the end, you get an assignment that you build and it gets checked and stuff. So very college-like experience. Yeah.

So that was the first certification I did. The second one was the cloud practitioner from AWS, which is the foundational. Yeah, I'm sorry. I was going to jump in and say, like, that's more of the foundation. It's less technical. It's more like how the cloud works, like understanding how different services work and different options you have when you deploy to AWS. And yeah, so that one, even if you're not a software engineer, you could potentially go and get that certification. And Freecode Camp has several prep courses.

most of which are taught by Andrew Brown, who is this legendary, like he's a CTO who just is obsessed with taking certification exams and passing them. I think, uh, I've got an interview on him, uh, with him on the podcast, by the way, if you're curious, I can't remember what episode it is. Uh, but, uh, Andrew Brown, uh, created this, uh, company called exam pro also Canadian, by the way, he's based in Toronto. And, uh, so he publishes regularly, uh,

he's covered all the AWS certs, all the Azure certs, all of the Google certs. He's covered like some of the new GitHub certs, covered a lot of stuff. Uh, Kubernetes, you know, um, I think he's covered chair form. Yeah. Lots of stuff.

So anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt your flow. Oh, no, no, no. I was going to mention, because I used Andrew's Cloud Practitioner course on FreeCodeCamp. So all of this is available on FreeCodeCamp YouTube. If you just type AWS, all of his AWS courses are going to show up. So I used his course to prepare for that. And then also, once I transitioned into the cloud engineer role, I got my solutions architect position.

which is a bit more associate level than the cloud practitioner. I got my developer associate and my sysadmin, or sorry, I think it's called sysadmin. Yeah. So there are three associate level certifications from AWS. So I got all three of them. Then because we were acquired by this big enterprise company, they used Azure and some of GCP as well.

So like, Hey, Google cloud compute. So these are the big three. So they're multi-cloud. Yeah. So basically they had like, they were like this big corporation that acquired different companies. So depending on which company they acquire, if they're using Azure, if they're using GCP, you know, you don't really know. You'll know like once the acquisition process has started and stuff like that. But basically we had like sister companies that,

And they wanted to consolidate the engineering team. So instead of just our cloud engineering supporting just our SaaS, they wanted to support at the enterprise level, which meant if there are people who are willing to upscale in Azure, you had incentive of, well, you're going to stay with the company for longer and be part of a bigger engineering team. And did you opt to earn Azure certifications as well then? Yeah.

So I started upscaling in Azure, did the AZ-900, which is the fundamentals, the Azure fundamentals, did the AZ-104, which is Azure Administrator, AZ-204, which is Developer Associate, AZ-400, which is the DevOps Engineer Expert,

um, for the nine hundreds, there is like SC 900, which is security AI 900, which is AI fundamentals. I did all the nine hundreds. So I did all the fundamentals, which are, I think four or five Azure certifications in themselves. And then I went on to the associate ones. Um, the toughest one is the expert. So, which is the easy 400, which is a DevOps engineer expert. Um,

Because later on in my career, I transitioned to a DevOps role. Wow. So I've been keeping count, and it sounds like you've gotten at least a dozen. Last I checked, I think I have around 19. Wow. Yeah. So it's not quite the 50 that Andrew Brown has, but his whole company is based around him passing these certification exams, helping you pass them. Yeah. You're just taking these to be able to continue to progress in your career.

That's really impressive, man. You must be really good at taking exams after all this time. I think so. I think so. Also, it really helps as you progress through your career. Like I have made like a few blog posts and videos about this. I recently took the AWS DevOps Engineer X Professional, which is considered a very tough exam. I didn't study for it at all.

and passed it. The reason is because now I have

like the amount of experience that I have just speaks for itself. And like, I have the underlying knowledge for most of these exams that I can just sit down. And if I have to do like few prep, like it usually takes me a week to just look at things that I, I'm not using day to day. And then I just sit my exam compared to like me just starting out, learning about this new cloud. What is the cloud? You know, it's very different.

Yeah, I mean, that's a testament to the accuracy of the certification. If a professional who can go in without any prep, completely cold, and still pass it just based off of things they do day in and day out. Yes. So it sounds like it's pretty well designed. And you said that's the AWS DevOps professional. Congrats on passing that. Thank you. Man, it sounds like you're filling up the entire Infinity Gauntlet with different certifications. Did you ever get the Google Cloud certs?

I did as part of when I went to Google because I was going to work on the GCP team. You were required to get the associate cloud engineer within your probation period. So I was able to get it within the first 20 days of joining Google. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to sit this exam and I passed. So for GCP, I only have the...

associate cloud engineer that too because it was kind of like a job requirement yeah well working let's talk about google so a lot of people are like oh google is just a big tech company and like i talked to a lot of people that work at google and they're like it's just another big tech company it's not that big a deal but like for like the average kid uh in india or china or even in the united states like thinking about like where do you want to apply what would be your dream job i bet you like probably like

seven out of 10 of them would say Google would be the company they want to work at. Like that you've made it. If you work at Google, right. And a lot of people for them, it's like, there's like kind of your job application process before you've gotten a job at Google. And then your, your job application process is,

When you're an ex Googler, right? Like it, like it represents kind of this, this Rubicon, uh, after which you cross it, like you're, you're just completely different in the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers and people like that. Cause you've gone through that gauntlet and you've worked there. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience at Google. Um, and, uh, you know what, what it was like being there and getting into that role. Uh, yeah, I'd be excited to hear it.

For sure, for sure. I think the story is kind of out there, but for a bit of context, COVID happened and everyone was stuck at home. Specifically, Canada, at least our state or our province, had pretty good strict regulations. So I was just stuck at home now having more than ample of time to be on my computer and

And I landed on these day-in-the-life videos of people working at Google. And then you go down this rabbit hole of there are people who are kind enough to share their compensation, the amount of money they make at Google or any other fan company. And to me, that was like a light bulb moment. I'm like, oh, I should apply for big tech companies, right?

Because I think I'm skilled enough now. And later on, so I didn't start right away applying after watching a day in the life vlog. But I started preparing for big tech interviews and stuff. Like, what is all that they ask? System design is one of my...

I would say strengths because of the background I have. So I started learning about like how Google, Google maps work, um, like to very small detail, how Netflix does streaming. Um, there are a lot of good videos available on YouTube and free code camp itself on how these, how basically architecture patterns work and how they have been able to architect these big services that are used by billions of people. And, um,

Luckily, I think it was June, May or June, a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn from Google that, hey, we have this team called TSC in Canada that is looking for candidates and I think you will be a good fit. And I think that works out really good when a recruiter reaches out than you applying to Google's career site.

So I'm like, yeah, I'll definitely be interested. And so they started the loop. The loop was six interviews. Six interviews. Wow. And I was working full time. So I had to like, be like, oh, we can only do like one interview a day kind of thing. And it took me like two weeks, I think, to go through all of them, two or three weeks. I also asked them for one week for prep before starting the loop and

So the entire process took me four weeks until I got a rejection. So the reason I got a rejection, I knew this. I bombed my coding challenge interview. And yeah, that didn't go well. But every other thing, I think I was pretty confident. And I was like, maybe they'll ignore the coding challenge because how the other interviews went wrong.

But no. So I got a rejection and I was bummed out because for me, I thought this was my only chance. This was my only shot to get into a big tech company.

Before this, I was also talking to an AWS recruiter for a cloud developer role. And that one was also tragic because I bombed my first interview, which was like general tech screen. So it was not like specific to like coding challenge or networking. They were just going to ask multiple questions that could be anything like how to optimize a SQL server or

or, like, there were some networking questions and stuff. Like, for some reason, they...

There were a few questions that I found challenging, but basically they didn't put me through the next round. And a lot of these interviews, my understanding, not having gone through a lot of them myself, is it is kind of the luck of the draw. Like if you get lucky and they ask you the questions that you have a good understanding of the domain and you can answer them well, then yay, you got in. If you get unlucky and they ask you, you know, that you don't have a lot of expertise in, then, you know,

So to some extent, it is kind of a numbers game just by virtue of the sheer arbitrariness of a lot of these interviews and which way the dominoes can fall. Definitely, yeah. Now that I look back, yeah, I definitely think that. And so after having my rejection at Google, previously also being rejected at Amazon, I'm like,

Yeah, I was not in a good place. I still remember, like, I was just a sad person for, like, at least a week. It was affecting me in ways that it shouldn't have, now that I think back. And, yeah, I just dusted myself up, and I'm like, okay...

So these big tech companies, they have a cool-down period, so you can't really apply for new roles until six months. And that was what I was told by both Amazon and Google. And I'm like, okay, we'll revisit this in 2021, because at this point it was August. And out of a sudden in December, like early December, first week of December, a recruiter reached out from Google again.

And they're like, we have like an adjacent team to the role that you interviewed for. They're called technical solution specialist. I'm like, okay. And they briefly explained me how this team is adjacent and stuff. And then they're like, are you willing to hop on a call? I'm like, sure. So I hopped on a call and then they're like, hey, we know. So because they didn't provide me any feedback back when they rejected me.

companies don't provide feedback on how you did in each round. And generally that's just because they don't want to get sued for discrimination. Yes. But this time they're like, you did really good on your system design, your network troubleshooting. And there was another one that they were like, you did really good. The ratings were really good from Googlers. The coding challenge is what you bombed.

But because this is an adjacent team, they don't really need the coding. The interview process doesn't have a coding challenge.

I'm like, okay. They're like, if you want to consider this team, we can move on with the interview process. Okay. So you don't have to repeat all those other things that you've previously done. Exactly. That's what was surprising to me. They're like, since you did this three and a half months ago, we have that rating that we are going to use. And you only have to sit down with the hiring manager to see if you're a team match or not. And they have this...

um, interview called Googliness, which is basically a behavioral interview. Cultural thing. Yeah. So I did that and that was like just one 45 minute call that went really good. And instead of taking it four weeks, like the last time, this time, the first week I talked to a recruiter, had my Googliness second week, I got my offer. Uh, it was so quick. Um,

And I'm like, oh. And then, you know, it was surreal for me. I'm like, I have an offer from Google. Obviously, it had, like, it was good pay bump stocks and stuff. Like, I was also not used to that. Like, previously, for four and a half years, I only made, like, base salary. I didn't know, like, total compensation is a thing where at big tech companies, you get stocks, bonuses, and then

Apart from your just base salary. So that was really good. I think not just from monetary perspective, but also career aspect of it too. And yeah, then I joined Google. Yeah. And what happened during the time that you were at Google? I think the first month went by really quick. As I said, the onboarding, it was like a...

You know, just too much information. Yeah, drinking from a fire hose. It was just too much, too much information. I think the things that I loved was the structure they had. And you would like, you know, assume that because of how big Google is, they already have a really good structure on how the onboarding is going to happen. Whereas I come from working at smaller companies and

It was not that structured. So that was really good experience. The team was great. My manager was great. Were you working fully remotely still? For the first month, yeah. But I was required to relocate to one of the office towns. So I chose Waterloo or Kitchener area. Yeah.

And then they basically covered the relocation stuff. Um, so I relocated to a new city. That's when I started going into the office. Um, and I really enjoyed it because the perks and the offices that Google has built, they're just mind blowing. Yeah. And the food was amazing. Um,

And our setups obviously were amazing and stuff. They create a good workplace environment for you to feel comfortable and have everything that you need while you are working your whatever hours they might be. But that's also when the unfortunate time of layoffs happens.

a lot of companies. Obviously, Google did their own and a lot of the teams that were adjacent to us and directly our teams were also affected by these layoffs. So,

which caused a lot of uncertainty. And there were just decisions that were being made at the leadership level, like outsourcing to low cost of living countries and cities specifically for this role. And I had my own reservations about it. On top of that, I didn't enjoy the role as much because a lot of it was supporting GCP customers and

Whereas I had the idea talking to the recruiter that it's going to be more of a consultant role where you will be like architecting GCP infrastructure for a GCP client. But it was more of supporting people or supporting customers. And someone who has worked in tech support previously, to me, it felt like I started feeling like I'm back on

four years in my own career nothing wrong with the role nothing wrong with the people that were like i worked with like there were amazing people oh my manager was amazing it was just me not being happy about it sounds like you weren't able to use a lot of the knowledge that you've built up over the past four years you were just going back to what stuff like yeah i can i can imagine how that would feel like a big step backward

Yeah. So I started looking at what I could do still, because Google is... Like, I didn't want to leave Google. That was not my first thought, at least.

And right after my probation ended, which was 90 days or three months, I told my dad how – and it started affecting my day-to-day too, my personal life as well. I was unhappy and not – if you don't have a fulfilling job, it affects other aspects. It's a huge part of your working life. Exactly. Exactly.

And I told my dad about this and he thought I was going mad or something. I mean, you've achieved the dream. Yes, exactly. He's an engineer and he probably wants you to have financial stability and be able to provide for your family and have prestige and all these things. Yes. And here you are. You've achieved the dream, but it's not exactly what you thought it was going to be. Exactly, exactly. And then, but...

to his advice, yeah, I spent another month. Um, I'm like, okay, maybe this is just a change that I'm not like comfortable with. I'll take some time, get used to it. But that was not the case. I also tried like transitioning, um, within Google, but there are, you know, obviously there are policies that, um, you have to stay in the role for a year before you can pivot to something else. You need performance ratings and stuff. Um,

And I guess I was just not ready to wait like another 10 months for a move. And I couldn't bear in this role. Like I couldn't spend the 10 months in this role. And that's when Twilio happened. So Twilio saw what I was doing on the side, you know, creating technical content on my own YouTube or my own blog. And Twilio's like, hey, we have this role open and we think you'll be a great fit. Yeah. And I'm going to give people some context into Twilio as a company like Twilio.

It is a really awesome company. Like, I have a profound amount of respect. I've been to their headquarters a few times. I've talked with tons of Twilio engineers over the years. I've used Twilio for a lot of hackathon projects. RecodeCamp doesn't currently use Twilio for anything. But if you're doing, like, anything that interfaces with phones, like...

sending text messages, making automated calls, receiving calls from clients and routing them. There's an incredible amount of telephony that is opened up through their various APIs and things like that. And you can kind of completely leapfrog having your own switchboard and all the other stuff that you used to have to have. And you can just interface with APIs as a dev. So...

There you go. We're not sponsored by Twilio, but I wanted to give people some context. This is like a big tech company. It's a big deal. They have very high standards in who you bring on. So even if you haven't heard of it because they're doing a pretty niche thing that a lot of devs may not be familiar with, it is a big deal. It's not as widely known as Google, but I would imagine they have similar standards in terms of bringing on engineers and developer advocates and cloud engineers. Yeah.

Definitely, definitely. And yeah, that's how I'm like, oh, I already do this in my personal time. Maybe it's time to test it out if I like it as a career because I am someone who is passionate about teaching. I am ready to solve. If I can make any dev's life or any engineer's life easier with my content, why not?

So I think the purpose was already there. The passion was there. It was just like the timing and the opportunity kind of like came at the right time and place. I was not happy at Google. So I'm like, okay, I'll try it out. And then I went through the interviews and yeah, I got the role and I'm like, okay, it's time to say bye to Google. So after four and a half months, I, um,

accepted an offer at Twilio and joined them as a developer advocate. Well, that's great that you were able to kind of smoothly transition without like a long period of having to go back on the job market. So very smart of you. Like I always tell people, like no matter how dissatisfied you are at a job, unless you're literally being like abused by your manager or like losing sleep or overstressing or something like that,

generally you want to stay in that role. It's much easier to find a job if you have a job because employers don't have to be like, okay, so why don't you have a job currently? Like it just removes one like little kind of like checkbox that they're going to have to like investigate. Um, so, uh,

It's the saying about conventional wisdom from the 50s or 60s. Less contemporary time, obviously. But there was like, always hire men who are married. Then you know that there's at least one person who can tolerate the bastards. Yeah.

That's what they used to say. Of course, that was back from the company man era. Like if you watch Mad Men, one of my favorite shows and stuff like that. But yeah, you were able to transition. You're a Twilio. We don't have to go too deep into what you do day to day, but I am kind of curious. Developer advocacy is kind of like a hybrid thing.

hybrid like developer role and kind of a marketing role in the sense that you're getting out in front of people and you're showing them what the tools can do. And you're inspiring people to pick up those APIs and start incorporating them into their own projects. I hope that's a good. Yeah. No, I think that's a, that's a really good explanation. I think, yeah, on a broader level, it comes down to that day to day gets, you know,

because it is different depending on different seasons. Why I say that is fall is usually like conference season.

summer and fall so you'll see me going to a lot of conferences giving talks about our APIs and our products as you said it's a mix between marketing so like I do kind of showcase how our APIs can be utilized to make your lives easier if you're as you said if you're dealing with anything that's related to telephones like SMS voice or WhatsApp or even email yeah

Yeah. Awesome. And so I want to get some context into like where you think things are going. Like you are working at one of the bigger tech companies and you've worked at arguably like the biggest or second biggest tech company. And then you've also worked at like small, like a small startup that got acquired by a slightly larger company. Like you, you've had just in your, how many years has it been since, since you were working in the gas station? Like since you finished your, your college diploma? Yeah.

Um, seven, almost six, like almost seven years. It's been six years. Yeah. You've jammed a ton of experience into a pretty short period of time. What sort of things do you see changing? And what are you most excited about in terms of cloud? In terms of cloud? I think I want to take the discussion back to what you were mentioning. There are people who are trying to

Not advocate, but say that like, oh, having your own server in like a facility makes more sense than just going the cloud route. And I think operational excellence is something that we are going to see. People, not people, like companies have realized that they have spent a lot of dollars on cloud, specifically when it comes to compute and storage.

So they want to see how they can minimize the cost, but also make sure that they're using all the resources that they have allocated within the cloud. So if there is a VM, there's a group of VMs, virtual machines, within a specific cloud that a company is using.

they're going to make sure that all of them are at like at least 80 to 90% capacity instead of just being there at like, I don't know, 40 or 50%. So they're going to look for engineers, specifically cloud engineers who can help them achieve that kind of operational excellence. And that will come only if you have the skillset, if you know how budgeting and costs within the cloud model works.

Because cloud has different models. There is pay-as-you-go. But if you look into serverless and other stuff, different architectures have different pricing models. So I think that's where the big shift is going to happen, specifically within the small and medium businesses, is that companies are going to be spending their money very carefully when it comes to cloud. I think...

2015 to 2020 or 19, 2020 was a time where every company was just pouring money into cloud. They're like, no, get these contracts. Let's move everything to cloud. And, um, well, like keeping the bills somehow. Um, but now they're paying more attention and being more strategic about how they spend their resources. That is the first shift. I think, um,

that's going to happen. Yeah. So essentially just being more mindful of how expensive it is to use cloud services. Um, the second I already mentioned is, um, every company is trying to get on the AI bandwagon and running all these AI, um, either large language models or training your own models. As you said, you know, all of this, not everyone has, um,

the resources or even the money to have those resources in their own data centers or locations. So they're going to rely on a lot of these public cloud vendors to run those workloads. So if you can gain expertise in how these AI workloads can be run in the cloud on like, you know,

given infrastructure, like a specific kind of infrastructure with keeping the costs in mind in like a, you know, optimal way. I think that is another area that is going to grow and a lot of the jobs are going to mention that as a skill set. Interesting. So,

At the same time that people are trying to go back to on-premise or owning their own servers, this is a big movement in – like a lot of smaller teams will be like, we built our own servers. Like, here it is. This is the machine that you're actually interfacing with, and they'll take a picture and they'll tweet it and stuff like that. Certainly for like build servers and things like that that don't need to be in the cloud, that can absolutely make sense.

This said, there's a tension between, like, we don't want to be on the cloud. We want to save money, and we want to own our own hardware and all this stuff. And then there's also the tension that we can't own our own hardware. You can't own a quantum computer unless you're a multibillion-dollar company, basically, because they cost a fortune, right? You can't own, like, a cluster of GPUs because even if you have the money, like, it's...

like the production is so backed up right now that you would be in on a waiting list to be able to get, uh, you know, your H one hundreds and stuff like that. So, um, so I, it's interesting right now that there, there's that tension and there's that push and that pull. Um, are there any other big overarching mega trends to use a silly word, um, in the, um, in the cloud space right now that you've observed? Mega trends. Um,

Are there any tools? Let's shift to tools. Are there any tools that are having a moment? I think a lot of... It's not something that...

is trending right now. I think it's been a few years, but the, the automation, and we saw that with the DevOps kind of, of like roles, but also it shifted to like platform engineering, you know, tools like backstage, like having internal developer, like portals and stuff for managing infrastructure. I think a lot of more companies are investing in that.

Um, again, this comes from that comment about operational excellence, like companies want to be mindful on how they are using all of these resources within the cloud. So I think that it kind of like ties in together, um, where we are headed with the trends. Um,

And we also saw a lot of shift into traditional setup of using VMs to more of containerized environments and use of Kubernetes, even if it is Kubernetes, but also managed container services like AWS has ECS.

Yeah. Elastic container service. So containers are also something that are going to be trending specifically with the AI use case. So not just, you know, ordering your compute power by getting GPUs from NVIDIA and then some kind of compute from Dell or other vendors, but how you can, even if it's on-prem or cloud doesn't matter, but how you can leverage the

more of like a containerized environment for different workloads for that optimal use of the money that has been spent on the infrastructure. Yeah, and a lot of DevOps in cloud engineering really does come down to figuring out a budget and figuring out how to make things work within that budget or figuring out clever ways to automate your way to a reduced budget

or just making more crafty use of a resource. Like serverless is a pretty big innovation in that. It's been around for like 10 years, but basically Amazon Lambda, like where you can just run like functions in the cloud instead of having servers standing by, you can just, and you can have things done incredibly inexpensively unless you're doing those at a vast scale. So it's like, I think you get like,

of free Lambda calls. Oh, yeah. I think the last I remember, it was a million. A million. A month. Per month invocations. And that's like a lot of my stuff, specifically for APIs and like event-driven stuff, is running on Lambda or functions as service. Microsoft has Azure Functions. GCP has Google Cloud Functions. Right.

But it boils down to the use case. So if there is a use case for you using serverless, you should definitely leverage it because it's such a cost-effective method. And a lot of the management of infrastructure is abstracted away. You just give them your code and it runs it whenever you want. Yeah, yeah, awesome. So...

let's say hypothetically you are starting out, you're looking back everything, you know, about cloud competing and maybe you're just going to completely skip the, uh, the diploma you got, uh, the college, the technical college where you went, uh, community college where you studied like networking and, uh, you know, databases and, and, and those kinds of more, um, nuts and bolts type skills. Let's say hypothetically you, you had zero formal school. What would you do if you wanted to get where you are today?

And you want to get there as quickly as possible, and you ideally didn't want to spend money. For sure. To actually earn these certifications, like to take the certification exam, it might be like $200 per certification exam. So we're going to treat it like those certifications, you have money to pay for those, but you don't want to spend a bunch of money on anything else. Or maybe you have a minimal budget, like $200 a month or something for your training or less than that.

No, for sure. I think that $200 per month, I'm going to use that for your cloud builds. So what I mean by cloud builds is I would create like AWS or Azure account and then start building stuff. This would be a later part of the process, but since you have given me that $200, I think that's where it will be most used is just spinning stuff up in a given cloud provider and then

Because it's going to cost money once you run out of free tier services. That is where it's going to go. And I think you can literally do it by even within like, you can have a good project running in cloud for less than $20 a month, even if it's like it involves multiple services at a personal level, because, you know, you're not going to get as big of a traffic flow.

as some of these enterprise companies get. But I would start, if I was going to start from zero, where I have zero context, is I was going to learn some of the IT fundamentals on how networking works. So how internet works, first of all, DNS, how packets transfer, how computers communicate to each other. Because at the end of the day, all these servers within the cloud

you know, they use networking to talk to each other. The second skill I would really spend my time is on how Linux works, because I think there was a, I saw this photograph somewhere. I think it was Twitter. Like, I don't know, 80% of, um, servers on the internet are Linux or something like that. At least 80%. Um, yeah, because then people don't want to have to pay like a license for like, uh, you know, Microsoft, uh,

I'm not even sure what options there are in Linux. Every server FreeCodeCamp is every year used. We've probably deployed thousands of servers and spun them down over the years. We have more than 100 servers in operation right now. Every single server has been, I believe, like Ubuntu. Because that's just like a widely available image and it's battle tested. And so Ubuntu is a specific...

variant of Linux that has just become particularly popular. It's based on Debian, which is another distro, but they added a bunch of additional stuff. And it doesn't really matter that much, but you can definitely geek out and choose a very specific flavor of Linux that you like. If it's more security-focused or if it's more performance-focused or something like that. But yes, like...

I will quickly second the notion that you should learn Linux if you want to work as a cloud engineer because every cloud engineer I know basically is doing stuff in Linux all day long. Definitely.

Definitely. And I think, yeah, when you look back, once you become a cloud engineer, you'll thank yourself if you have those Linux skills. I don't even know if it is possible in today's time to land a cloud engineer role without the Linux skills. But yes, that would be my second skill. The third, I want to focus a bit more on at least having one programming language under your belt. So,

I highly recommend Python because if you're new, it's very easy to understand. There is a great community behind Python. There are ample of resources available online. There are communities that you can join to get yourself skilled in Python and get it to a point where you can do scripting in Python because a lot of cloud and DevOps engineers do scripting for automation and stuff.

That's when I'll start pivoting towards learning a cloud provider. So pick, I think the greatest advice I've given is see the market that, see the market in your city. So if you're in Toronto, look at the job listings of cloud engineers and which cloud provider is being mentioned the most. If AWS is more popular, look at the job listings of cloud engineers.

then Azure in your area, go with that provider if you don't already have made the decision. So pick one provider, go through the foundational certification. You don't have to sit the exam. The reason why I say go through the certification is because they have built a good roadmap of what you should learn first, what services you should learn in a

Good roadmap. So they give you a structure, and I think you should follow that. Then after you've done the foundational level, go for the associate level certification. Just prepare for it. Don't sit the exam if money is a problem. So you don't have to sit the exam, but when it comes to actually applying for jobs, would you say it's good to have the actual exam? Do you think the certification is worth actually earning? Definitely. I think having at least...

I would skip... If money is really a problem, I would skip the practitioner, have at least one associate level. So that would be like solutions architect for...

AWS, AZ-104 for Azure, and GCP is Associate Cloud Engineer. So depending on what cloud provider you pick, go with at least this certification if you want to increase your chances. I think it helps to a certain extent. Again, having it on the resume will help. But what you say actually in the interview, again, it all comes down to that.

So just having the paper, it doesn't matter, like have the knowledge underneath that certification. Awesome. So I want to break all that down because you've covered three very important things. I've been taking detailed notes. So first thing that you recommend, anybody who wants to become a cloud engineer, regardless of your background...

learn networking. Learn fundamentally how computers communicate with one another because that's what the cloud is. A whole bunch of computers communicating with another. Second one, learn Linux pretty well. The third one, learn at least one high-level scripting language. Python seems to be an excellent one. I strongly encourage everybody to learn Python. JavaScript is arguably easier to learn just because it's a little bit more visual and you can do it as part of web dev, but there's no harm in just diving into Python. And FrequentCamp has...

ton of resources on learning Python and Python is in my humble opinion one of the easier languages to learn it's arguably like the easiest major programming language that's in wide use to just pick up because it has like lots of different features that kind of force you into coding right whereas JavaScript you can just code whatever you want and it can be a completely ball of spaghetti and it can still work but you know Python kind of

it has patterns that push you toward actually like learning how to do things. Right. Uh, so those, those would be the big three things. Anything else that you would strongly recommend people do? Oh, and the three certifications that you recommended based on your, um,

of choice, which they are very comparable functionally in how they work. They have different services names. They have probably different little quirks between them, but you can skip the first certification that's usually less technical and you go for one of the associates. And that way, you know, a single associate certification, like if you have that, they probably assume you know everything from the more junior certification, right? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the only thing I would add is some kind of DevOps practices into it. So like,

Think of Terraform. So Terraform does infrastructure as code. Any of the companies you apply for, they'll have some kind of automation. Nobody goes through the portal and click through deploying an EC2 instance when there are hundreds, like in FreeCodeCamps example. If you want to deploy 100

you're not going to do it a hundred times through a console. So learn, all these cloud providers have their own CLI or command line. So either you can start diving into that. And also on top of that, I think Terraform is a great example for infrastructure as code because it's cloud agnostic. So it doesn't matter which cloud provider you work with.

you can write Terraform code to deploy your infrastructure in any of these cloud providers. So any kind of automation in respect to the DevOps practices, I would say, so Terraform and command line for that cloud provider and GitHub actions. So since you'll be building a project, I highly recommend it to have it in a GitHub repository or GitLab repository so that you can share it with your clients.

employer, like when you're applying for jobs, make sure it's well documented. But automation is only good when you can deploy stuff

automatically when changes happen in your code repository, that's where GitHub actions come in. So like start diving into how you can apply multiple, like if you want to do, you can build a end-to-end project, but how you can apply these DevOps practices into your cloud project, I think would be like a cherry on top and would really make you ready for like an actual job at a company.

All of this is kind of a roadmap on our Learn to Cloud. So Learn to Cloud is an open source guide or platform where you can learn cloud. It's free. It was built by my friend who works at Microsoft and me because we have had this like self-taught kind of journey into the cloud. So we kind of saw like, oh,

all of this was kind of missing in our journey. So let's create a resource that helps people, you know, get into cloud basically. So all of the technologies that I mentioned from like networking, Linux, scripting language, Python, and then even DevOps towards the end, like all of this is kind of covered there. So I highly recommend it to check it out. It's learntocloud.guide. It's a web app that you can,

Awesome. I'm linking to that in the show notes. Well, Rishabh, I think it's awesome. Everything you've shared with everybody here. I love that you have this amazing origin story that you are proof that you don't need to get a four-year degree to potentially work as a DevOps, as a cloud engineer, as a developer advocate, and that you can just go the certification route and that you can...

Not necessarily have to constantly change jobs or shop around for jobs, but actually find opportunities within your own current company. I love to see people do that and take advantage of any sort of lifeline from above, like mentorship, anything that they can get. I think it's a testament to how scrappy you are and how resourceful you are. And I also really appreciate you sharing all that knowledge.

really actionable advice on how to get into tech. I'm going to encourage everybody to check out, uh, reshops courses that we published on free code camp. Check out his YouTube channel, check out his learn to cloud website, which is awesome. Uh, I, it's, it covers Linux bash programming, uh, cloud platform fundamentals, DevOps fundamentals, cloud security, very important topic. So, uh, yeah, man, just thank you so much for being such a sharing person. Like a lot of people, uh,

are probably in a similar boat and they've gotten to where you are in their career and they don't necessarily take the time to help other people get to where they are. It's easy to just relax and enjoy your knowledge worker lifestyle with your interesting work and your high income and all these things. But you...

Take the time to share that wisdom and to make sure that other people have a nice clear path forward and you help reduce the ambiguity. Is there any advice you would send back in time to yourself? If you were sitting in that gas station for a long day, like looking at that money that you've been making, which is enough to provide for yourself. And it's easy to just imagine like an alternate timeline where we shop is, you know, seven years later, you're still in that gas station. Like what advice would you send back to yourself? Yeah.

I think I would probably say that keep dreaming big, but also...

just like, don't forget your dreams. So like, I remember me being a teenager and like, Oh, what all dreams I had, like, just don't, don't forget like what you have pictured for yourself in life, even when life gets comfortable. Um, so, uh, that is the, that is the only advice I think I would give myself. Um, and also like,

Things are going to happen at their own pace. Like just be consistent with like whatever I was trying to do at that time. So if it's learning a new skill, just like be consistent, like showing up every day or whatever cadence you have built. But yeah. So remember your dreams and then being consistent.

Awesome, man. Well, thank you again so much for making time to come on the Free Code Camp podcast. No, thank you. Thank you for creating this platform, not only for teaching and stuff, but also having so many amazing people who can share their story and kind of inspire and give roadmaps to others. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Rishabh. Everybody still tuning in? Until next week, happy coding.