A young person interacts with their classmates at a restaurant, jovially conversing and getting to know them. The sun is bright, glowing as the young person chows down on some food. A smile gleams on their face, this is exactly where they are meant to be. Unaware of the amazing, yet difficult, journey ahead of them, they relax and reflect on the times ahead. What is the future going to hold?
Well, I’m already breaking a promise to myself. It’s not terribly unusual of myself to not follow through on commitments I make to myself, something I’m desperately trying to work on. I think my grandfather on my dad’s side put it best, though, in that he told me that quality trumps quantity. He’s incredibly wise, and someone I constantly look up to and model my perseverance through. The words “quality over quantity” do ring true though. If I kept up with these posts every week, I’d probably not have too much to say. So, establishing a new creed going forward, these posts will only come out when I’ve truly something to say. In this case, I do have lots of things to talk about in this program so far.
The greats of this course definitely outweigh the not so greats, to begin. Being in an environment where I can be me, to the instructors who have passion for their teachings and the topics I’m learning, and the independence I feel in being a student in this course have made it worth it. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this feeling. Now that I have it, it’s something I’m holding on to for dear life. The people I’ve connected with often have that same love and passion for computing. They speak the same language I do. I can talk all the topics I’m so passionate about, and they’ll talk it right back at me. It’s infectious.
The topics are everything I’d ever hoped for, and more. While we don’t get to work on physical hardware, the fact that we are working on technical skills at a rapid pace is what I thrive in. I’m learning in-depth how to work with virtual machines, which, to be honest, is where the industry is transitioning to. In essence, they are computers within computers. There is specialized software that allows you to simulate the real hardware that we all rely on, called a hypervisor. There’s two types; type 1 hypervisors, which literally run on the hardware as an operating system, and type 2 hypervisors, which operate within an operating system like Windows or Linux. In this class, we are using our laptops and type 2 hypervisors, mainly VMWare Workstation, to run our virtual machines. At home, though, I am using Proxmox, a type 1 hypervisor, to run my media stack and all the services I need on my own network.
The server course has been enlightening in many ways. Also using VMWare, we learned about the underlying higher level technologies that help computers communicate between each other, mainly DHCP and DNS. DHCP, or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, is a protocol that, when set up, hands out IP addresses to computers that don’t have one. As my instructor put it, when a computer joins a network, it calls out to the other computers, saying, “Hi, I’m a computer with no IP address, is there a DHCP server around?”. If there is a DHCP server on the network, it’ll look at its database of leased IP addresses, and say, “Yep, I’m a DHCP server, here’s a free IP address on our network”. It’ll also send any configuration information the computer might need to contact other services on the network, primarily how to get out to the internet at large, and the primary DNS server.
You might ask, “Well, what’s DNS?”. Well, I’m glad you asked. DNS, or Domain Name Services, is kind of like an internet phone book. We as humans don’t really remember a numeric address like 142.251.152.119 very well. But, if I told you that I know a site like www.google.com, that sticks much better in your mind. When you type www.google.com in your browser, your computer talks to the DNS server and says, “Hey, do you know the IP address for www.google.com?”. DNS goes through its phone book, and says, “Oh yeah, I know that address! It’s 142.251.152.119! Here you go!”. If it doesn’t know it because it was accessed recently, it’ll talk to other DNS servers to find that address. As a sidebar, if you were to type 142.251.152.119 into your browser, it will go right to Google. No joke.
In the networking course, we learned about the underlying stack and the history of how computers communicate at the lowest level. Everything in networking can typically be modeled through the OSI model, a model developed by the Open Standards Institution in the 1970s/1980s. There’s seven layers that every network communication goes through. It’s fascinating to break down every layer, because there are technologies on each layer that we interact with every day without knowing. Take TCP, or Transport Control Protocol, and UDP, or User Datagram Protocol, for example. They are embedded in everything we do on the internet. For things where staying live and on-time, UDP is used. It simply sends out data without confirming there’s someone on the other end to receive it, or confirming that the data was received in the first place. Things like video calls, live streams, voice calls. Otherwise, we use TCP, which does a three way handshake to open a connection, and once it wants to close the connection, it also does a handshake. It also has built-in ways to resend information that didn’t make it to the end, and ordering the information so if something is received out of order, it can reorder it.
Even the course I was most panicked about, the professionalism course, has been a foundational point in my psyche. It’s a little demoralizing to hear that entry-level positions are incredibly competitive, but I know my instructor doesn’t shy away from letting us know that that’s the case. Instead, they encourage that you continually improve, continually fight to stay in the game. Network amongst people, attend job fairs. It’s incredibly validating to know I’ve been doing the right thing. Even something as silly as getting a business card and passing that around at job fairs is a valid way to get my name out there. The last thing I should be doing, and that’s been reinforced quite heavily, is to sulk in the basement and not do anything. I completely agree. I’ve been fighting a long time, and this is no time to stop.
As far as the things that haven’t been going so great, the one course that’s been interesting in different ways to navigate has been the project management course. The information has been very useful. I can apply the information I’m learning to my past experiences, which has been important in retrospective. Understanding how to plan a project, come up with an idea, and pitch that project, is something I’m reflecting on heavily when it came to my prior job as a software developer. I did have to pitch my ideas, and unfortunately, I was denied on a couple of those ideas, probably because I didn’t pitch them properly. I wish I had this knowledge then, but hindsight is 20/20.
Unfortunately, we were randomly assigned teams for the entire course to demonstrate teamwork. In my cohort, there are thirty of us in the class. We were divided into six groups of five. My group of five ended up much more dysfunctional than I would have liked. I ended up with someone I can work with well, the friend I mentioned who I connected with on the first day, is on worker’s compensation, and needs to pivot. They work incredibly hard, and we work well together. The rest? Well…, I wish it were sunshine and rainbows, but real life and luck had other plans.
One of my teammates I was brought together with, they have excellent ideas. Whether they put in the proper effort to show up to class and our meetings, that’s a whole other story. It’s not exactly the best thing to work with, but it’s operable. The other two have brought more trouble. On our project pitch, both had decided to use AI in their submissions, which, okay, I understand to an extent, but there wasn’t any additional effort to hide that it was AI. One used clearly AI-generated images and ideas that we could not include because they weren’t relevant. The other, which I still am struggling to understand, pasted the output of an AI in a blank slide and submitted it. Neither cited properly, which, if we were supposed to use their work, could have ended up getting us expelled for it.
I take my education seriously. I often wish other people would too. It’s obvious we paid a lot of money to be in school, so to see some of my classmates not take it seriously is disheartening. The not showing up for class often, or to an extent, using AI to do their work for them. Maybe I grew up in a different generation, and I truly am that grandpa shaking his fist at the kids playing on their lawn. Regardless, I need to focus on my education solely, and that’s something I’m working to improve on.
I want to take a moment to reflect on the people who I’m connecting with as well. They are all unique in their own right, but I couldn’t have asked for anything better. After the first week, I went out to a Boston Pizza with a good group of folks, and that continued to reinforce my love of the people I’m with. One’s enthusiastic about keyboards, and has one wild keyboard I can’t describe without pictures. Another loves Linux, and has been trying to get us all into a modded Minecraft server. There’s more, but without their support, I wouldn’t love this class as much as I do now.
My grandfather has supported me through many things in life. I respect him more than anything in the world. When he first read my first post, he told me he couldn’t stop smiling. It was like I was there with him, in the dark, in front of a door. I open the door, and a world of possibilities was ahead of me. I think about him, and my grandmother on my dad’s side, who’s sadly no longer with us. She was an inspiration to me, and I know for a fact that she is up there watching, her many dogs running around her, and she’s got a huge smile on her face too. She’s cheering for me. She taught me everything. She taught me golden rules, ones I’ll adhere to for the rest of my life. She never stopped supporting me throughout her time on this earth, and I continue to remember her like she’s still here. I miss her, but her memory won’t die as long as I’m alive. I’m simply sad she doesn’t get to see this in person.
I know, though, she wouldn’t want me to be sad. Keep my chin up, and enjoy this opportunity. Live life to the fullest.
I’ll do it for you Grandma. I’ll do it for myself.
Cheers.