Anand Tech Blog

 I passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam 3 weeks, back I should I written a blog about it as soon as it got done. Better late than never. My goal was always to get AWS Solution Architect Associate, but it seemed too ambitious. I was not serious about it for a while, then last year Las Positas College was providing a cloud computing course. It was broken into 4 course, first 2 course was catered towards practitioner and next 2 towards Solution Architect Associate. This Spring, the next 2 courses did not happen for whatever reason. I was kind of stuck now, so I decided to focus on Practitioner. First to prepare, I wanted to get a book that would provide the exact curriculum with reading material. I just cannot focus 100% when the recorded video is on. So I reached out to my professor in Las Positas Debbie Fields and she suggested "AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide" by Ben Piper and David Clinton, It is a Sybex publisher.  Then I signed up for some practice tests Ude...

 Having been a systems architect for last four years, I feel I can talk about being an architects better now, than I could 4 years back. Before being an architect, I admired the documents, the artifacts and  the diagrams they created, honestly I was intimidated by it. Now after 4+ years, I feel that is the easiest thing to do as an architect. I have put some of my thought together, and these are somethings that have worked for me. Architect I feel is just a liaison between the business team and the technology team, well, the statement seems too simple, it does get complicated as you dive deeper. For someone to be a good architect, most important thing is to understand the business requirement and also be technically competent.  If you are in sync with the product owner or the analyst, 90% of the battle is won. The product owner wants to build an application, they have a release date, the product goal, and the budget. Now the architect has to make it happen based on it....

I have been involved in a project for last 4-6 weeks and the requirements are still not nailed down. The project involves integrating a vendor software to our current applications. The product is supposed to solve certain business use case and requirements are coupled based on the product capabilities . Being an agile project everyone from technical teams, architects, and business are involved in designing the user story. Since everyone is involved, architecture flow is not getting blessed. Every time the architect designs the flow, business or the tech leads have their own version of how the product capabilities should be merged. I feel sorry for the architect and product owners. Their project is getting delayed unnecessarily. Strong leads and product owners are very much required when running an agile project. In every project there are some known and some unknown or ambiguities. Take those to separate discussions or parking lot and resolve those. Create the user stories for what is...

Today I cleared the part 2 exam of TOGAF and clearing it has been a big relief. Was working on Togaf part 1 for almost 6 weeks and couple of more weeks for part 2. Part 2 is little simpler compared to part one is my feeling and if you have worked as software architect it helps further. On the preparation front, I took the Udemy course by Scott on TOGAF part 2, the course material is about 2 hours. The main takeaway there is how to identify the solution that is irrelevant. There are 4 possible solution to the case scenario, and grading is like 5 for the right one, 3, 1, and 0 for the distractor. The idea is identify the wrong one quickly and they move between them to identify the right one. The exam is an open book and you have know little bit how the material is organized. For practice test, I purchased the sample question from opengroup.org and practiced it couple of time. Part 2 test has only 8 questions and with 90 minutes to complete, looking at it seems like lot of time, but ...

Recently one of the projects I was architecting went live. All the data that was stored in an excel sheet prior to this project was be ported to a DB. Data was loaded to lower environment multiple times and the real data was loaded to Staging Database prior to production. The story is good so far. On the day of production, the same data was copied from Excel and uploaded to production with help of DBA and his scripts. When the data was verified next day, to my horror, we discover couple of rows with junk characters at the end of primary key. The excel sheet had couple of white spaces in the end for that column, it is a mystery how it got converted to special characters. A production CR  was created to delete the row, then a new set was to be added with additional rows that were not in production. The second round of data upload was to take place using ETL too. I was little at peace with this approach as the insert would happen only to the batch table and then it will moved to ...

Couple of days back, I passed the TOGAF foundation test, I still have to complete the part 2 test. I read through various blogs on TOGAF before writing the exam. Most of them seem little old, and also I wanted to share my experience with TOGAF for folks who want to write the exam. Few months back, my friend suggested Udemy.com for taking online courses in software. Being a system architect, I searched for that. I found a training course on TOGAF, prior to that I had heard about it, but had no idea about it. So I did sign up for the course. The course gives you brief overview about TOGAF and covers the topic and at the end of each lectures, would recommend you to read the chapter from the online book from open group on TOGAF . Each chapter was so filled with content, I was kind of getting overwhelmed as well as intimidated by the content. Udemy course is just 10$-12$, it is a good place to start. There are other affiliated vendors providing the course, but those were not in my budget...