First, while I am still meticulously reworking imagery to ensure full IP compliance with Steam, I took the opportunity in recent months to pursue two advanced Azure certifications. I successfully completed the following: AZ-204: Developer Associate This certification covers core topics such as working with Storage Accounts, Virtual Machines, and Containers. I passed this exam with confidence. AZ-400: DevOps Engineer Expert Building on the Developer Associate, I pursued the DevOps Engineer Expert certification.

I’ve been into Azure for quite a while now as it’s my cloud provider of choice. As can be seen on the following screen, in 2024, I loved <3 spending my monies on cloud services. Initially, I did some experimenting with VMs on GCP, but this hyperscaler didn’t stick with me. Iirc, I didn’t like the interface, and, frankly, Google radiates these woke vibes for a few years now. If you’ve been around, you know what I mean.

For years, I worked exclusively with vanilla JavaScript—no React, no Vue, no Angular. I know about all of these frameworks, but I never had the opportunity to work with them. Angular, in particular, has bugged me because it has recently become the bread and butter of frontend development for full-stack developers. Angular is heavily dependent on TypeScript, so what better use of my free time and vacation than to dive into that?

After taking the 27001 Foundation last week, I decided to give it a try and peek into ISO 20000 as well. I had passed an ITIL V3 Foundation cert almost a decade ago and figured it would be a good fit to refresh some insights on IT Service Management aka ITSM. It’s somehow bread and butter to a lot of organizations, and 20k is also a standard you can certify against.

I recently had a short gig at a local internet carrier where I got in touch with the topic of ISO/IEC 27001 - which is fundamentally relevant to the protection of information. Briefly, the standard deals with the implementation, maintenance, and continuous improvement of an Information Security Management System, abbreviated to ISMS. This system ensures that standard measures (‘controls’) are implemented so that information is safe. I never fully understood how Risks, Controls, Processes, and Policies worked together in a unified way and how they fit into the bigger picture.