Simon Krenger

Getting training and exams done in 2020 has been challenging. After reaching my RHCE mid-February, I am now proud to say that I achieved my Red Hat Certified Architect in Infrastructure certification less than 9 months later.

To reach my RHCA, I took the following Red Hat exams. As you can see, it is OpenShift and Ansible all the way down:

• EX180 Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers and Kubernetes
• EX280 Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration
• EX288 Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Application Development
• EX407 Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation
• EX447 Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Best Practices

Of course, the journey does not end here as there are quite a few interesting topics still to learn!

Working for Red Hat certainly has its perks. One of them being that I have access to all the content from Red Hat University and I am able to take Red Hat exams for free. With these perks come of course some expectations. Customers expect a Red Hat TAM to be knowledgeable on a wide range of Red Hat products, even if they are not directly related to the function of the TAM.

The most common certifications for System Administrators and also for new TAMs are the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). So after passing my RHCSA exam in December 2019, I passed the exam EX294V8 to become a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in mid-February. The next step is obviously to become a Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA), in my case focussed on Cloud technologies such as OpenShift and Containerisation.

To prepare for the RHCE, I used Red Hat University Online courses (RH294) and also prepared using Tomas Nevars Ansible Sample Exam. As others have already noted, the RHCE for RHEL8 is a pure Ansible exam, so knowing your Ansible playbooks in and out will help you with the exam. The above courses and sample exam are great preparations for the exam itself.

My newest toy is a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus, a very nice smartwatch. In the past, I recorded my steps and other activity data using the Apple Health app on my iPhone. This means that I had a few years worth of activity data that I wanted to move from my Apple Health app to Garmin Connect.

However, that turned out to be not that straight-forward. Garmin only allows you to import GPX, FIT or Fitbit CSV files, not any Apple Health data.

So after completing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certificate back in October, I thought that this would be a good idea to also pursue the Solutions Architect certificate. So just before Christmas, I succeeded in getting the second AWS certification:

At SBB, for some workload we are leveraging the wonderful capabilities of Amazon Web Services. As a result, I have been working a lot more with AWS for the past few months and have decided to go for the SysOps certification. So here we go, I am now an “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate”:

While some AWS services are not perfect, I enjoy it very much to work with such a great platform. I am even thinking about getting more AWS certifications :).

I am happy to report that I finished my Oracle Certified Professional certification this Monday by taking the “1Z0-053 Oracle Database 11g: Administration II” exam. So officially, I am now a “Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Professional”.

While this certificate is certainly nice to have, I still think that there are many topics of Oracle Database that I still have to explore. So stay tuned for more insights in this blog :).

This month I had the honor to be featured on the SwissICT website as a database specialist. SwissICT is Switzerlands largest special interest group for information technology.

My portrait serves as an introduction to my job as a database engineer for people interested in Information Technology (IT). Since a database specialist is often a person that operates behind the curtain, I hope this interview can show some of the aspects of our daily jobs.

About one year ago, I posted my initial review of my Freitag Dragnet bag. Since then, this post has been one of the most successful posts of my site. So here comes the follow-up post with some of my thoughts after one year of usage.

First of all, I am happy to report that the bag is still going strong after all this time and a nearly daily usage (I use this bag for both school and work so it gets a lot of wear and tear). Well, now you can definately tell that the bag is no longer new and got a bit of usage, but it is still without any damages and holds up extremely well. So lets get to it…

I am pleased to report that I passed the Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English with the Grade “A”. Of course I am very pleased with the results and Cambridge states that:

Grade A, which demonstrates an ability at Council of Europe Level C2

Nonetheless, I hope to improve my language skills even further and hopefully get more proficient with the English language. But of course, this certificate is also a good way to show my proficiency in English to any employer that might come along…

This is a bit of an unusual review since I am reviewing… a bag! I could not find any other review of the bag mentioned here on the internet, so here it goes…

Update: For more images, recommendations and a report after one year of usage, see my follow-up.

Since my old laptop bag I used for work and school was a bit beaten up, I looked for a new bag for daily usage. I then came across the Freitag website. Freitag fabricates bags made from used truck tarps, safety belts and bicycle inner tubes. A friend of mine already had a Freitag bag and I decided to order a bag for myself. Now I only had to decide which one it was going to be.
My requirements where simple:

• Rugged, rain-proof
• Big enough for schoolbooks and papers
• A 15″ laptop fits inside

So I basically had the choice between the “Dragnet”, “Top Cat”, “Joe” and “Rex”. As you probably already read in the title, I chose a “Dragnet” bag, simply because Freitag states: