Nerd Life

Having been involved in cloud computing for more than a decade, I’ve heard from many IT executives working to move key enterprise applications to the public cloud. In several cases, their teams have struggled or had only limited success in their cloud migrations. But they never gave up and they used the lessons they learned to improve their results in subsequent attempts.

Recently, I passed my Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect—associate exam. While the information was fresh in my mind, I wanted to put together a post on my experience to help anybody else thinking of going for a similar certification. I’m a technical support engineer at New Relic, and in my previous job I was a DevOps engineer. I have a good deal of experience with Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing. I’ve used hosted static websites using Amazon S3 and Amazon Route53.

Not long ago, we needed to hire a new manager for my Python team in New Relic’s product organization. As part of the hiring process, candidates interviewed with the engineers on the team. This post is about how I worked to make that manager-interview process as productive as possible. As an engineer, I’ve never really known what to do in a manager interview. I’ve always just walked in and expected someone else on the team to ask all the questions.