I’ve recently decided to scale back some of my social media and other time-wasting activities.

Initially I was trying to do this with browser plugins to block specific sites. Unfortunately, I was too clever for my own good and removed those plugins or opened incognito windows whenever I wanted to, say watch Youtube or browse Twitter.

So I tried to think about how I could make this even harder for myself and decided to change my hosts file to redirect urls to another IP effectively blocking all my site vices. Here’s how I did it.

It’s official, I now hold all three associate level AWS certifications. After procrastinating for the last three months, I finally passed my SysOps exam and completed the trifecta of AWS associate level certifications: AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator.

Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for those of you considering taking any or all of these exams.

Interested in creating and deploying your own Flask application using Docker and ECS? Well, good news, I just published a post on how you can do this. Here are the highlights:

Recently, while running the Redmond Python Meetup I’ve found that a great way to get started using Python is to pick a few common tools to start learning. Naturally, I gravitated towards teaching the basics of one of the most popular Python packages - Requests. I’ve also found it’s useful to throw in using Beatiful Soup to show folks how they can efficiently interact with HTML data after getting an HTML page.

Sound interesting? Let’s look at what I typically cover - including a few basic examples of how you can use Requests to make HTTP GET and POST requests.

I’m happy to annouce my newest course, the AWS Certified Developer - Associate Level certification prep course.

This course is by far the largest one I’ve ever done and has a LOT of content. There are over 14 hours of videos, as well as a variety of labs, flashcards, and quizzes.

Here’s a sneak peak of what you can expect inside one of my favorite labs: