Which came first? The chicken or the job experience?

There’s a common catch-22 people run into when looking for their first job. You have no experience, but you need experience to get your first job… in order to get experience. So what are you supposed to do? Since the exaggerated dawn of time, many have wondered, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Nowadays, a more pertinent question young workers often find themselves asking goes more like, “Which comes first, the job or the experience?”

Over the past decade the job market and technology have merged into a synchronous coliseum of competition. College courses can’t keep up with speed in which tech companies push out software that consumers use on a daily basis. After spending years of your time on college campuses most people find themselves stuck in a world where they have to continue learning just to get an edge in the game.

This same rhetoric goes for experienced individuals in the job market, more specifically the IT industry. Certifications help validate skills and the knowledge required to show HR department personnel your levels of competency but they expire every 3 years as they grow into new certificates to stand with the times. How does one show they know how to use relevant software without the burden of violating security protocol and exposing their companies data on the web? Is one forced to become an entrepreneur after work and showcase their talent by building web apps on Azure or AWS to prove their cloud based skills. Do they have to build and blog weekly about their technical struggles to prove to recruiters that they have met skills requirements and have shown how they correct and make changes to their own forced “personal projects”? The answer is, well, yes.

Yes to all of it. A well drafted resume is great start for people who want to do more than clock in and find a job. If your looking to build a career its going to take work and some sacrifices. One of the better things about technology is that you don’t need to hunt in someones backyard to steal their lamb and use their blood for sacrificial approval. As Kid Cudi once said “There must be 50 ways to make a record”. To stand out above the crowd one does not simply have to scan job boards and beg for employment. This may not work in other countries but here in America, there are opportunities to showcase your technical prowess for free. Github, a social code sharing site (that does much more) gives instructions on how to create a webpage for blogging purposes (like the one you click on to read this blog).

I have worked in the IT industry for 6+ years and well over 2 years well versed in the world of Linux in Enterprise (at the time of this blog post). I even have Ubuntu’s canonical logo and the Linux penguin tattooed on me because I believe in the philosophy of Ubuntu and love linux. Sadly though, that is not enough. Companies are still looking for someone who can prove their skills or has 5+ years in specific cloud based technology or bash/python scripting. After losing my job due to the abrupt changes from the COVID-19 pandemic I started to question how I could find a way to show that I was not only skilled with the certifications under my belt, but that I was competent in the software and technology stacks that I worked on at my previous jobs and in my free time. So I decided to leverage my Linux, networking, AWS, Devops, and technical knowledge to create a project that would help gather more insight on the damages of COVID-19.

PROJECT CUDI (continuous user development interface)

This Project was built to do 4 things:

Provide information on the affects of COVID-19
Break the chicken’s neck and scramble its eggs to demolish the chicken or the egg stigma that comes with experience and and the US job market.
Provide proof of passion for Tedley Meralus in hopes to gain future employment with a company that requires his Liam Neeson-esque set of skills.

Objectives

Use a technology to provide information to others.
Leverages knowledge of cloud and networking skills to provide evidence of competency
in the following skills.
Provide a public location to showcase them
- Jenkins
- Ansible
- python
- AWS
- Networking/DNS
- Docker
- Github
- Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
- blogging, writing, literary skills

Jenkins Demo (Devops CI/CD)

You can login to the jenkins site with the follwoing username / password

Jenkins Docker Container

Dev Environment Script (Bash Scripting)

https://github.com/tmeralus/dev-environment

Application Monitoring

Nagios Deployment with Ansible https://github.com/tmeralus/ansible-role-nagios-server

Bash Script:

Dev Env Script https://github.com/tmeralus/dev-environment-script

Ansible Playbook: Redis HA deployment

Redis HA deployment https://github.com/tmeralus/ansible-role-redis-sentinel-HA

• Docker: Nagios Container

Nagios Container https://github.com/tmeralus/docker-nagios-setup/blob/master/Dockerfile