Further Study Recommendation

Diceicle

Hello Developers,

I realize that stricktly speaking this Q should be under 'Education' but as this is a niche audience question I thought it would get a better response here.
Hope thats ok.

I'm looking to get a recommendation of a Web App Dev course that either yourself, friend or colleague has experienc of and which I will apply for later in the year.

I've recently completed National College of Irelands Part-Time (pt) Higher Dip (Level 8) in Cloud . I'm heavily considering their Post Grad in Web App Development.
What holding me back is the timetable / workload. The Cloud course was m/w/f/s every week. That was heavy going, what with a full-time job to do as well.
The post-grad would be less class-time, insofar as its Tues / Thurs / Sat, so thats something, but its Project heavy; a guy I know who is doing it talked about juggling multiple projects etc. He's jacked in his job to study full-time. Not a possibility for me.
One other positive of the Postgrad in NCI is that it is only 2 (maybe 3) semesters, so its condenced.
I'm still studying online (Udemy) and developing my GitHub repos; but what I would like to know from yourselves is:
Is there any courses out there that would match the above but have a less arduous timetable?

14ned

Diceicle wrote: »

What holding me back is the timetable / workload. The Cloud course was m/w/f/s every week. That was heavy going, what with a full-time job to do as well.
The post-grad would be less class-time, insofar as its Tues / Thurs / Sat, so thats something, but its Project heavy; a guy I know who is doing it talked about juggling multiple projects etc. He's jacked in his job to study full-time. Not a possibility for me.
One other positive of the Postgrad in NCI is that it is only 2 (maybe 3) semesters, so its condenced.
I'm still studying online (Udemy) and developing my GitHub repos; but what I would like to know from yourselves is:
Is there any courses out there that would match the above but have a less arduous timetable?

Speaking as a former tutor for the Masters in eBusiness at UCC, the biggest problem we had with students was their lack of willingness to invest the time required to master technologies. I wish it were different, but you can't escape the 10,000 hours you need to master a field, and the students we had who got first class honours and had some chance after the Masters of being able to actually build a functional website were the ones consistently investing 50-60 hour weeks since the very beginning. That simply doesn't gel well with full time employment.

I'd suggest one of three approaches: (i) quit your job, go on Jobseeker's for a year and then use the Back to Education route through the course (do NOT waste your year, spend every single day pre-studying and building test websites and clouds on your local machine(s)) (ii) get your employer to give you 15 hours per week for study and/or partial sponsorship of the fees (iii) get up a few hours early every day and invest that plus your weekends in creating your own cloud orchestrations, then volunteer to configure and maintain one for a widely known open source project where your work will be very visible, and do that successfully for a few years to get it onto your CV.

The first option will probably mean moving back home to keep costs low.

The second option is tough to achieve with Irish employers. There is little culture of investing in staff training here.

The last option is by far the cheapest, most flexible, and will have you into a job faster than your head can spin - once you've invested the two to three years required. Employers don't usually want people with qualifications, they want someone with freshly proven evidence they are competent for the problem at hand. Being chief admin for a signature open source project's core infrastructure is by far the best CV addition you could make, and best of all it's almost free of cost but very expensive in self discipline, costs on friends and family, and you can forget about any hobbies you might have as this will be your sole hobby from now on.

I appreciate that isn't probably what you wanted to hear, but to be honest any course in web app development is probably not going to be compatible will full time work, at least if you want to get a good grade. And, to be even more honest, companies don't want web app programmers anything like as much as a decent web/cloud admin. The former can be found easily if you're willing to pay enough, companies are always bitching about the lack of skilled web devs but the reality is they just don't want to pay what good devs cost. Decent web and cloud admin on the other hand really are hard to find and retain, and are worth real money. A good admin saves your company getting hacked and all its data held for ransom, and provides a long list of very high value risk mitigation.

Niall

Diceicle

Hi Niall,

Thanks for the detailed reply.

What you have said makes sense - with your option III being the only real viable option in terms of a path forward.

Regarding your advice to concentrate more on the Cloud Admin end rather than the programming end of the spectrum - its not something I've actively considered. I have been working towards the goal of becoming a Web Dev in Rails and Javascript, but wouldn't rule out pivoting to Cloud Admin if it made sense; though I would need to get more info for myself to see if it seems like a desirable move.

Would I be far off the mark in thinking that in order to move further along with the Cloud Admin route, I would have to get Google App Certified Admin qualifed and increase my knowledge of AWS and Azure for starters?

Would you know any good resources off-hand to start implementing what you recommend?

14ned

Diceicle wrote: »

What you have said makes sense - with your option III being the only real viable option in terms of a path forward.

If you want to keep full time working, probably yes. If you don't have kids nor a mortgage, I wouldn't underestimate the route of deliberate unemployment, it may be morally wrong but in terms of lifetime earnings if you're still young it can be an enormous win for you personally to throw yourself onto welfare deliberately for subsidised training.

Diceicle wrote: »

Regarding your advice to concentrate more on the Cloud Admin end rather than the programming end of the spectrum - its not something I've actively considered. I have been working towards the goal of becoming a Web Dev in Rails and Javascript, but wouldn't rule out pivoting to Cloud Admin if it made sense; though I would need to get more info for myself to see if it seems like a desirable move.

Would I be far off the mark in thinking that in order to move further along with the Cloud Admin route, I would have to get Google App Certified Admin qualifed and increase my knowledge of AWS and Azure for starters?

Would you know any good resources off-hand to start implementing what you recommend?

You're still thinking in terms of gaining bits of paper.

There is nothing wrong with that, but you have to remember that certifications are a proxy for what employers really want which is a proven (with evidence) expert in a field who can do the job required with their eyes closed because they've been doing exactly the same thing for years now. Degrees and all bits of paper are simply some evidence that the candidate in front of you may be comparatively more useful than others you are looking at. None is as good as someone already working in a role which is exactly solving the problem at hand.

If going the cert route means you start earning better sooner, then the cost benefit can pay off. A lot of the time the cost of getting the certs exceeds to benefit in any reasonable time span - if you really like the topic though, it still can be worth it just as a personal thing.

Regarding getting in practice with Google App Engine or AWS, both offer free accounts for low volume usage. Much more fun and valuable for learning is installing your own copy of OpenStack on a local machine and sharding out Swift over a ZFS storage array. Back in the day when I did all this I bought old second hand PC components from ebay for cheap, and built out a network of ancient small FreeBSD servers for testing out cloud orchestration.

You can take as many certs as is humanly possible, but I guarantee you will learn far more by building your own cloud from scratch with old components where lack of RAM, and finding ingenious ways around the lack of RAM, is your single biggest problem. All that said, I probably invested a good thousand hours back in the day, it's not cheap in terms of opportunity cost.

They have been valuable skills to have to this day though, and I've been running cloud-ish personal infrastructure ever since based on FreeBSD and Proxmox running on Kimsufi ultra cheap dedicated servers.

Niall