Your Personal Brand Phase at Encora Apprenticeship — Week 4

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

This post is part of a weekly assignment at Encora Apprentice and in this series, I’ll share my journey as a Software Engineer Apprentice. I hope these stories help and motivate others on their tech journey.

This week at Encora

This week at Encora was full of Cloud Computing concepts, do some research about Linux and networking troubleshooting commands. I also got to study a little bit about Javascript and some useful data structures.

DevOps and the Cloud

AWS defines DevOps as a set of philosophies, practices, and tools that help organizations increase their software development velocity and quality. Many tools that help to accomplish DevOps objectives are part of a Cloud environment.

Image from Amazon Web Services

Some of DevOps activities are:

• Continuous integration and continuous delivery. These are the practices of frequently merging code changes into a centralized code base while running tests and also having the code in a deployable state all the time.
• Monitoring and logging. After the software has been released to production, it is important to keep insights into how it's doing and monitor it and a great way to do this is using logs.
• Microservices. Microservices is an architectural design approach that suggests separating big applications into smaller, simpler services that will interact with each other to form a more complex structure.
• Infrastructure as code. This is the practice of provisioning and keeping track of deployed infrastructure using code. Since we use code to manage these resources, we can also run tests and reviews in this code.

Networking and troubleshooting

On my quest to dive into Cloud Computing, I came across many network concepts and some issues that can happen and also how to find them. I first started to study the TCP/IP model, which is a proposed network architecture that consists of a layered structure, these layers provide services to the upper layer and have well-defined functions.

Some useful commands that can give us insights into network issues are:

• tcpdump — Gives us information about the traffic of a network.
• ip — Powerful command to configure network interfaces.
• ping — Command tool for troubleshooting, testing, and diagnosing network connectivity issues. Sends an ICMP package and waits for a response.

Javascript

This week I also had a technical mock interview, for which I chose JavaScript as my stack! I got to learn more about Promises, which are an object that links producing code (which can take some time to produce an output) and consumer code (which will consume the output of the producing code).

I also got to learn about truthy and falsey values. truthy is a value that is considered to be equal to true when tested in a boolean context, and similarly, falsey is considered to be false in this same context.

Recap

This week was a hectic but really fun one, I got to learn and revisit many concepts as well as practice at many interviews too! I want to keep working on my Cloud and Linux skills and also keep doing some coding challenges to stay sharp in that department too! With the last mock interview, I also got to know about some concepts and skills that I could improve, and that’s always an opportunity to grow!

Before I go, I’d like to mention a lesson from Effortless Mastery: We should approach new learnings and experiences without the fear of making mistakes, and this also includes interview processes!