9 Months as a Remote Worker

9 Months as a Remote Worker

I can now officially state that I know what it's like to be a remote worker, and one area that I'm enjoying is being a self-starter and learner. Covid-19 has caused my company (Ricoh) to go into a fully remote-work mode, and it has taught me a lot about managing time and creating schedules, boundaries, and committing to deadlines. I've been able to grow my technology stack, and I've made an effort to take courses, read books, and do tutorials that enhance my interest in a problem, project, or curiosity.  Before Covid, I didn't have any real project experience with AWS, and now, I'm knee deep in various AWS components; quick sight, lambda, ec2, s3, cloud front, RDS, Glue, and many others.

As a remote worker, I've discovered that you have to be prepared to learn things on your own. It's easy to ping someone on Teams, Slack, or some messenger application; however, to understand what is going on, it's essential that one dives into the documentation and understands the work's details you learn and can repeat.  I found myself setting up S3 buckets for various projects, for example, an internal static HTML site, an external static HTML site, an area in which *.csv files are uploaded only to trigger lambda contents are saved in Aurora.  It wasn't until the 4th or 5th iteration that I felt comfortable automating some of the tasks, creating, destroying, and recreating various resources that I realized the benefits of the many options AWS provides to design a solution that meets the need.  I can say the first projects I just wanted to complete, so I went with the data from StackExchange or Google and didn't learn anything.  I keep notes and screenshots in my OneNote, and I hope to organize them to share the information and create blog posts that make sense.