The Rise of Speculative Wealth Traps​

Before diving into this post, I want to clarify my specific beliefs regarding sports betting and prediction markets. In a vacuum, I have no moral qualms with the principle of gambling. I’ve certainly laid down some sports bets while in Las Vegas. That said, I do not play daily fantasy sports (DFS) or engage in any sort of online betting or prediction markets. Mirroring many of my thoughts regarding social media, I personally feel that unfettered online access to the dopamine hits of gambling is deeply unhealthy for the human psyche. In addition, I believe that the potential for sudden personal wealth via highly speculative risks (much like cryptocurrencies) attracts so many willing participants due to the rapidly vanishing middle class and the increasing scarcity of quality job opportunities. As the already massive global wealth inequality continues to widen, I view these as yet another transfer of capital from the middle and lower classes back to corporations and executives. As a diehard sports fan, I am also profoundly disappointed at how intertwined sports media and betting have become. People today simply cannot watch any sports coverage without being bombarded with online betting ads. In fact, I fear that new sports fans are now unable to distinguish between betting and the sports themselves. Kids and teenagers today only know betting to be woven into the very fabric of sports.

A Hill Worth Dying On​

I am living proof of the American Dream, though I fear that my story is becoming less and less common. I was born and raised in Victoria, Texas, a city of 65,534 as of the 2020 census. In this blue-collar town, I grew up in a working-class home. My father is one of 14 children to immigrant parents and spent the vast majority of his life working in the brutal oilfield elements to provide for his family. My mother, also the child of an immigrant, worked as a substitute teacher. They often reminded me to pursue what my father called an ‘office job,’ which, in hindsight, represents socioeconomic betterment. Although I have now worked in the technology industry for 13 years, being a software engineer wasn’t a vocation that I even knew existed when I was growing up. I was fortunate enough to take a Java programming class in 2004, which radically altered the path of my life. So much so that I spent four years volunteering by teaching AP computer science at various high schools in Houston from 2018 to 2022 to pay this forward. Education is core to my beliefs and identity, and in many ways, that started at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’m tired. Existentially.

Motivation and Background​

While I’ve used Kubernetes professionally in a few capacities (particularly in customer engagements while working at AWS), I wanted to cement my knowledge and increase my mastery with a systematic approach. I decided to prepare for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam. I’ve taken and passed more than a dozen technology certification exams spanning AWS, Azure, HashiCorp, and more. This exam is unique in several ways. Namely, it’s all hands-on in a lab environment. Azure exams often have a coding, configuration, or CLI command component, but even these are typically multiple-choice questions. The CKAD presents you with a virtual desktop and several Kubernetes clusters, making you tackle 15-20 tasks with a strict two-hour time limit. I put together this repository and post for a few reasons:

About the Book​

Recently, I started reading a fantastic book called The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman. From the description:

About​

This is a tool that I developed and open sourced at AWS. Find the latest in the GitHub repository here. It’s released under MIT-0.

Solution Overview​

As I wrote about previously, AWS users are shifting left on costs using DevOps and automation. While tools like Infracost are powerful for estimating costs for Lambda and other services, they alone do not provide optimization or tuning feedback during the development lifecycle. This is where a tool like AWS Lambda Power Tuning assists:

Overview​

I learn best by doing, so with every release cycle, I take the time to build fully functional examples and digest the blog posts and video content. Below are some of my favorite releases from re:Invent 2022. You can find all source code in this GitHub repository.

About the Book​

Recently, I started reading a fantastic book called The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman. From the description:

Solution Overview​

My current role focuses on every facet of AWS cost optimization. Much of this entails helping to remediate existing infrastructure and usage. Many customers ask how they can shift left on cloud costs, like they do with security. Ultimately, cost consciousness needs to be injected into every aspect of the engineering lifecycle: from the initial architecture design to implementation and upkeep.