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A Few Small Things

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#certifications#aws#career#reflection

Hello all,

I come here, head down, to share some bad news... I didn't get a big project done this month. Instead, I did a few little things, things that may or may not be meaningful in the long run, but that I wanted to do for myself.

Of those things, two stand out the most.

  1. I took and passed the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam
  2. I overhauled a Minecraft server running on an EC2 instance

Getting Certified

So, first things first. I planned to do three certifications this month. The AI Practitioner, as I mentioned above, was one, but I had also planned to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and the Anthropic Claude Certified Architect exams.

The Certified AI Practitioner exam was first, and I spent the first week of June preparing for it. The exam itself wasn't as challenging as I thought, but trying to focus on preparing definitely was. It hasn't even been two years since I graduated, and it feels like all my study habits have disappeared.

That ordeal gave me some perspective on what I'd need to do to complete the second exam I'd planned for, the AWS SAA-C03 exam. I was hoping to study for and get it done in two weeks, but I ultimately decided to postpone it. I realized I don't have anything to prove to anyone, and that I'd rather take more time to prepare and pass than to cram and potentially fail.

That leaves me with one. The Claude Certified Architect exam. Unlike the other two, this one was being offered through the company I work for, so it took precedence over the SAA-C03 exam. That being said, I still struggled to stay focused when studying for it this month. With the deadline I had initially been told, June 30th, quickly approaching, I began to panic. Thankfully, that didn't end up being the true date for the exam, so it is with relief that I write this post today.

So that leaves me where I said I was. Current standings: Me - 1, Certification Exams - 2. Hoping to bring it back next month!

Minecraft Server

The Minecraft server project came with a lot less pressure. This one was just for me.

Let me lay down some groundwork. I already had a perfectly fine instance that had a Minecraft server running on it. There wasn't even a two-week Minecraft stint in the friend group this month. So why go through the effort of setting up another one?

Well, the previous server was set up manually. This was fine in practice, but there was a bit of trouble a few months back when we decided we wanted to upgrade versions. I believe we went from 1.21.4 to 1.21.5, so not that big of an upgrade, but still a pain.

I had to get the new server version, connect to the EC2 instance, upload the new version, make a backup of our old version's world, then update all of the mods to the new version. Not a technical marvel, but annoying to do and a bit of a waste of time when we want to play immediately.

With this new version, my main goal was to make this process easier, and wouldn't you know it, someone had already solved the problem for me. A docker image with everything I needed, right there, plus a sidecar image that handled backups. Each one is stored in S3 under a dated key per world, so same day backups just version the same file, and non-current ones get cleaned up by a lifecycle policy. It was a dream come true! The version upgrades, backups, and mods all solved just like that.

So then I decided to take it further. Minecraft was already handled for me, so I improved how I would set it up instead. That's where my setup script came into play. With it, I could set up the entire workflow: the git repository, the environment variable fetching, even registering the instance's public IP address in Route53. All of it could be done with a single setup script that runs every time the instance loads.

Once that's done, all I have to do is run docker compose up -d and it's go time.

Like I said, this month wasn't defined by a specific project where I learned all sorts of interesting things or did something special. It was just some personal development with a little something to entertain me on the side, and I'm glad I did it.