The secret to becoming good at anything is getting your hands dirty

What is THE biggest challenge when trying to learn a new technology? We feel stuck in the famous catch 22:

• We need to have crazy skill to do serious projects.
• We need to do serious projects to gain crazy skill.

Our two options are:

• We take an intro course on Udemy or Pluralsight, which enables us to do “hello world” after watching 200 hours of videos.
• We “fake it till we make it”, trying to “learn on the job”. 50% chance we’ll fool everyone, 50% we’ll corrupt a database in production. Some like these odds!

Luckily, there is another option. Welcome to the Unicorn Project.

What is Unicorn Project

The main idea is to have a fully documented, production ready, open source platform, calle the Unicorn Project.

Unicorn Project has two components:

• Develop. We’re making an open source platform for submission and voting. It can be used for anything that requires users to submit their “candidate project/idea/whatever”, people vote, and the Leaderboard tells us who the winners are. More details about this in the About Unicorn.
• Learn best practice of Cloud Architecture and Web Development using Serverless and DevOps. Unicorn architecture and code will be used in all examples.

There are two rules:

• Rule 1: FOCUS, meaning - we focus on a particular set of technologies, and we go deep, including Security. This means - no “Hello World”, and no Passwords or Access Keys in the code! We’re talkin’ Production Ready, stuff you can reuse on your production projects.
• Rule 2: SIMPLICITY. As A. Einstein would say: “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Every Technology and every explanation needs to be short and concise, everything you write, read it again and elimitate half. Repeat.

Problem we need to solve

To be a Cloud Architect, you need to be equally comfortable with Infrastructure and Development. This is a complex set of skills. I do interviews for my team on a weekly basic, and 90% of candidates for a Cloud Architect position don’t even understand what a Cloud Architect is. Let’s put it like this, you need to be able to:

• Help customer define the requirements
• Define the architecture, explaining WHY your architecture looks like that, and argument why, out of so many options, you took each of the Design Decisions.
• Deploy the solution. And not just “here’s where the docs are”, I’m talking both app and infra code in the repos, everything encrypted both in transit and at rest, correct-cert-rotation-policies, etc.

What are your current options to achieve the required set of skills? You could do million hours of various videos on Udemy… the issue is that while you’re learning one thing, the other is getting forgotten cause you’re not using it… if you’re reading this, I guarantee this has happened to you…

What exactly is the plan

Instead of taking you through infinite number of materials and technologies, my idea is to focus on the specific set of technologies, and get real. No bullshit “create a Hello World Lambda”, or “which database is right for you”. I’m talking about:

• Choose a technology stack
• Briefly explain why that’s the stack we’re working on
• Define the requirements of app I’ll build, and help you define yours
• Define the final architecture
• Deploy everything, step by step

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