EDUCATION
// the paperwork says finance. the terminal disagrees.
1
degrees
2
certifications earned
7
in the exam queue
finance
field of study
// the official record, stamped and everything
Four years of balance sheets, discount rates and risk models. Not one lecture on pointers.
+ Corporate finance, valuation and financial modelling, which is why I read an AWS bill the way other engineers read a stack trace.
+ Statistics and econometrics. Same maths as half of machine learning, worse notation.
+ I started taking paid software contracts at Dryback in February 2019, so the last stretch of the degree ran alongside real clients.
// badges earned the boring way, by sitting the exam
AWS Solutions Architect, Associate
@Amazon Web Services
Sat it after years of already running production on EC2, RDS and S3. Most of the studying was learning the names AWS gives to things I had been wiring up by hand.
Investment Foundations Certificate
@CFA Institute
The other half of the CV. Ethics, portfolio management, securities and how the industry plumbing actually fits together. Useful every single time I build something that touches money.
// currently studying. not earned yet, so they get their own shelf.
AWS DVA-C02
AWS Developer, Associate
Next one up. The architect associate covered the drawing, this one covers the code that has to run inside the boxes.
KCNA
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate
The entry point to the CNCF set.
KCSA
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Security Associate
Threat modelling a cluster instead of just running one.
CKA
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
Two hours in a terminal with no Stack Overflow. I have been running production clusters since 2022, so this is mostly about speed.
CKAD
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
The same exam format from the other side of the deployment.
CKS
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist
Needs a live CKA to sit, so it lands last by design.
HashiCorp Associate
HashiCorp Certified Associate
Terraform has been provisioning my infrastructure for years without asking me to prove it. Time to make it official.
## The honest version: the degree says finance, the job says backend. Go, Kubernetes, Django, Terraform, the whole stack I actually get paid for came from documentation, other people's source code, and breaking things in environments that deserved better. Eight years of that is its own curriculum. It just doesn't come with a certificate.
I did not pick finance and then abandon it. The interesting problems, to me, are the ones where the code has a balance sheet behind it. Quantitative finance and algorithmic trading in particular: pricing models, backtests, execution logic, the kind of system where a latency budget and a risk limit are the same conversation. I have built payment gateways, an ERP with a real general ledger, claims processing for medical aid, and the platform the largest forex trading institution in Zimbabwe runs on. I would like the next one to have a strategy attached.