Mayer's Musings — Andrew Mayer

Picking up from where I last left off - my studies on VPNs and IPSec have taken me through Direct Connect, over VIFs, and, to where I’m at today, AWS storage. I’ve nested here for a bit, having spent the past two days on NAS, SAN and DAS. Adjacently relevant? Yes. Required for the AWS Solutions Architect exam? Nope. And that in a nutshell explains why I’m on year 2 of studying for an exam AWS says takes 2-3 months.

And while I thoroughly enjoy studying the nooks and crannies, and while I think understanding the on-prem infrastructure that runs corporate America is genuinely worth the time, it’s somewhat exhausting having to explain every few months, “yes, still studying for that darned exam”. My former boss took notice of this and on his way out of the company, advised me to focus less on AWS and more on system design. He recommended Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which I was already in the middle of (clearly he’s not subscribed). His advice wasn’t wrong if he thought I were spending my months in IAM documentation or memorizing the throughput and SLAs of every service. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m using the structure of the AWS exam as a tour guide through important technologies and patterns.

Storage Gateway, for instance, caches locally and ships to AWS asynchronously. The obvious reason is speed — you’re reading off a local disk instead of round-tripping to the cloud — but the second-order effect is the one I find interesting: a flaky link doesn’t take the application down with it, because writes just queue up locally and drain once you’re back. Defense tech has an acronym for networks that behave like that, DDIL (denied, degraded, intermittent, limited), and systems there have to assume that’s the norm, not the exception.

And while I can do another technical post about all I’ve learned - maybe another time - this post is less technical and more a system update, nearly a month post Palantir rejection. Am I still on track to meet the objectives I initially outlined? Mostly yes. Am I still incredibly motivated? 100% yes. What’s interesting is that this isn’t the first time I had this “fire” beneath me. Other events, both personal and professional, have similarly driven me to fight. But in those cases the motivation barely made it longer than a week. And here we are, nearly a month since, and I’m still setting my alarm for 7AM every morning to get in an hour of work before real-work. So, as I write this from the notes app of my phone while walking through midtown Manhattan on my way to real-work, I can confidently say that most of my free time is dedicated to at least one of my goals. The one goal I’ll most likely miss: finishing Designing Data-Intensive Applications by November. And that’s in part due to the responsibilities I’ve added since.

One of those added responsibilities is reading through non-technical defense tech books. Claude recommended The Kill Chain, Army of None, Unit X and others. I bought around 6 of those sorts of books and I’m halfway through the first, The Kill Chain. Another addition, and one I’m frankly impressed with myself for, is defense tech conferences. One day this past week while sitting in the office, the thought just appeared in my head - “why not look for defense tech meetups in NY”. So I spent some time looking at my options both in my area and inside my own company - apparently JPMorgan holds an annual defense tech conference. Limiting the search to NYC and its surrounding areas turned up nothing promising outside of some smaller, poorly maintained meetup groups. So I widened it to DC and the results exploded. I have no idea what to expect, but I’ll be attending the AUSA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., October 12th-14th. Over 40,000 attendees and 700+ exhibitors - it should be fertile ground to build a real network in the industry. And unlike my interviewing skills, I’m great at walking into a room where I don’t know a soul and making my way through a crowd.

With those added responsibilities, other ones have fallen by the wayside. I’ve been derelict in my fitness commitments. Gym attendance went from 5-6 days a week to 3 (at best), something I would have called unimaginable a year ago. And when I do go, I’m listening to a podcast or reviewing my last Claude conversation on some technical concept I didn’t fully grasp.

Finally, after all this, I’ve started a book club with my 9-year-old nephew. He has a Kindle and told me he loves fantasy and sci-fi. I remember that age, throwing myself into a new world where the only thing you want to do is turn the page. Our first book is The Merchant of Death, the opener of the Pendragon series. I read it at his age and loved it. Now I get to experience that thrill once more with him.

That’s all for this post! I have family incoming from Israel this week for the Jewish holidays. Excited, but I unfortunately expect a slowdown in progress. Then again, being back home around childhood friends who are further along in their careers than I am has, in the past, done a lot to motivate me. Burn baby burn.

Hobey-ho! (IYKYK)