I’ve afforded myself a brief vacation. Aside from passing the CompTIA CASP+ this last August, I’ve been spending time relaxing and enjoying time with my family. Unfortunately, I missed my window to renew my VMware VCP5-DCV. It turns out this is totally OK, so I’ll be certifying in a newer version of the data center virtualization test track soon.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to embrace my educational goals. I’d like to head more toward the direction of software engineering. While I have solid sysadmin skills that I’ve developed over the past twenty years, I’ve had a lot of focus on scripting, automation, and working with code. This includes a couple of years that I worked in a software shop as a Quality Assurance Engineer. I’ve had about 50% of a computer science education (but not the important 50%) and know enough to freely admit that there’s a hell of a lot of things I don’t know. I can write code reasonably well, but the theory is what sets apart a computer scientist from someone hacking some code together. I thought at first, I could just take a few classes and get accepted to a master’s program, but with ROI and time to graduation taken into consideration, I decided to get the ball rolling through completion of a second bachelor’s degree through WGU.

I’ve already begun studying some trigonometry and precalculus concepts to get back up to speed for my start date of 01-March-2019. Most unfortunately, I don’t have an official evaluation of my credits that transferred from my first degree with WGU (Bachelor of Science in Information Technology – Security), although I’m pretty sure I’ll be left with around 54 credits to complete.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this academic journey as well as the fun or noteworthy projects I do outside of work and school.