Building a Cloud Engineering Career While My Toddler Destroyed My Sleep Schedule
How TikTok, a layoff, and countless sleepless nights led me from operations to cloud engineering
I never expected TikTok to change my career.
I was scrolling one night between toddler wake-ups when I found someone talking about AWS cloud engineering. Infrastructure as code. Serverless architectures. It clicked.
The Before
15 years in operations and customer service. Managed CRM systems, handled budgets, kept things running. Stable work.
As a stay at home mom, I started learning on the side. My cousin, a software engineer at Google, suggested Linux and Python. I learned vim. No real plan, just wanted to keep learning.
June 2023: I got laid off.
The Layoff
Choice: go back to operations or try cloud engineering. Toddler, mortgage, no CS degree.
I went all in on AWS.
Learning While Broke
5 AM study sessions. Nap time tutorials. Late night debugging half-asleep.
16 months unemployed. Every dollar counted. Hundreds of applications. Zero offers.
What I Built
Cloud Resume Challenge. DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, S3, CloudFront. Migrated to Terraform with OIDC.
Serverless job scraper. Lambda, EventBridge. Built it because I was tired of manually searching Indeed for hours.
NBA Data Lake through Cloud Cozy Discord. S3, Glue, Athena. Game Day notifications with SNS.
ExamPro GenAI bootcamp. Technical blog posts. Helped other career changers.
AWS Solutions Architect exam: 707 out of 720. Failed by 13 points. Retaking January 16th.
Now
Production AWS projects. Serverless architectures. Infrastructure as code. Technical blog. 600+ portfolio visitors.
No job yet.
16 months unemployed. Hundreds of applications. Some interviews. No offers.
But I'm not the same person from June 2023. That person knew operations. This person builds cloud architectures and debugs Lambda at 2 AM.
What I Learned
You don't need perfect conditions. I had nap times and determination.
Community matters. Cloud Cozy, ExamPro, Discord servers kept me going.
Build real things. I could've watched videos for 16 months. Instead I built projects that solved problems.
Your story is your story. I found AWS through TikTok, learned it during sleep regressions, built while broke. Not bootcamp to FAANG, but it's real.
If you're building a career in stolen moments: you're not behind.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a cert exam to pass and a toddler demanding snacks.
Want to follow my cloud journey? Check out my portfolio at stratajen.net or connect with me on LinkedIn.