By no stretch, that is my natural strength. I like challenges, which is why I’m working on it. I read tons of materials covering various “tips and tricks” of public speaking. Based on my personal experience, it boils down to two points: Preparation Practice When I know that I am well prepared, my stress level goes way down. There is nothing more I could do to improve my performance. I am a huge fan of the iterative approach to systems design and implementation.

This is a sample section from my future training - AWS IoT Services explained: Your Ticket to the IoT World. I am preparing that course as entry-level material for people interested in the Internet of Things domain and AWS Cloud. No programming skills or AWS knowledge is required to benefit from it. In this video, I illustrate the concept of an AWS IoT Thing and how to use it to store information about devices in the AWS Cloud.

I participated in countless meetings where no one dared to ask essential questions. Participants would ask vague, complex queries, pretending to understand the topic at hand. Others would respond in the same unclear way - yet another unproductive meeting leaving everyone involved more confused than enlightened. What if someone dared to ask a simple question like: What do you mean by X? How does X bring us closer to Y? What do we expect when we reach the Y?

A legacy production line in a factory is not easily “abstractable”. Putting an IT server on the shop floor won’t cut it. To provide business value, I would suggest starting with the installation of sensors having independent connectivity. This way, we can quickly begin to gather operational data and transfer it to the backend system. That initial visibility provides a significant outcome of its own. Independent sensors work in the read-only mode.

“I do not know” - this answer differentiates experienced professionals from the rest. That single statement makes me trust the person I am working with. It also makes me value their guidance considerably more. When you openly state that you do not know something, it makes people respect you far more. As a Junior Developer, I felt significant pressure that I should know all the correct answers. I feared admitting the lack of knowledge would decrease my value among team members.

Modern solutions utilize distributed infrastructure to deliver business value. Manual management of those assets is error-prone, time-consuming, and does not scale. Fortunately, we often leverage a virtual infrastructure offered by the cloud providers. One of the benefits of a cloud is that we can describe it using code. That approach is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC). ​ ​What benefits does IaC offer?​ ​ IaC enables using agile software development methodology to describe and manage infrastructure.