It’s been a time since I’ve posted here and y a lot has happered and is going on.

I have been tocusing it very hard on getting a challenging professional accreditation . The test was under an extreme time limit – two hours for 16-17 questions, about half of which had two or more sub questions. For those keeping score that’s about 7 minutes per question.

It was also a practical test – you get an envionment for every question and you have to fix it, or run things in it, or create things in it. It was “open book” in that official documentation was allowed, but no Google search or AI agent was permitted. One of the things tested was your ability to quickly navigate the documentation, old school.

The details of the test aren’t what I want to focus on, but rather on the challenge, effort and approach to learning complex things in depth.

What helped me stick to a very tight and challenging to study schedule was two things:

• My quarterly plan. One of the main blocks in it is “Professional Development” and under this block I broke down 8 weeks of focused study and review for the last stretch before my proctored exam.
• Scheduling a date for the exam. Having a definite deadline pushed me to take my studying seriously in much the same way as signing up for a race gets me focused on improving my running.

I had someone ask me what is the point of going through a stressful exam that doesn’t really simulate the way I currently work (as no AI agents or Google search is allowed). My answer was that I believed that through challenging myself I would improve the depth of my knowledge and experience and become better at what I do regardless of the tools at my disposal. This has proven to be the case even while I was still studying for the exam – as both AI agents and searches improve if you know how to guide them. In other words, the more professional and experienced and knowledgeable you are, the better and more effective you get at using these tools and others.

I also participated in a 10k race about a week ago. My result was much better than I expected, as a result of focusing on strength training, targeted speed work and most importantly – mentally pushing myself during the race. Endurance races are about 50% a mind game – telling your brain to shut up as it’s yelling at you to slow down or stop. While the result wasn’t a PR it was pretty close to my PR which is not something that I’d thought I would be able to do post cancer and chemo.

The morning after the race, when my body was still aching from the effort, war with Iran broke out. Since then my life is stuck in survival mode- I spend my nights on an air mattress in the local shelter and my days trying to work and live in between runs to and from the shelter. I don’t know how long this hellish situation will last, and the uncertainty and helplessness of it all is crushing at times. I do, however, regularly remind myself that I have survived not only multiple rounds of regional war, I have also pulled through a year of cancer and chemo hell. I didn’t choose this, I can’t control it, but I will do my best to pull through it as well as I can.