Christmas, AWS, and a New Year

This post was originally written 09/01/2026

I nearly opened this with some pithy rhetorical question designed to make you feel something. Then I remembered that’s exactly what everyone uses ChatGPT for, and the last thing the internet needs is another pseudo-insightful opener it didn’t earn. So, no quip. Just a blog post, written by hand, for better or worse.

Welcome to my blog, where I document my journey from IT Manager with L2 support experience to, eventually, something resembling a Cloud Engineer. The plan is to keep it honest, keep it useful, and occasionally keep it entertaining. We’ll see how two out of three goes.

The AWS Bit

For the past few weeks I’ve been making a serious push toward the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate exam. It’s been on my radar for a while since the organisation I work for explored implementing Amazon Connect as the telephony solution for our Service Desk, and I was lined up as the BAU lead. The project didn’t go ahead, but I’d seen enough of the ecosystem to recognise AWS as a genuinely interesting eco-system and my collaborating with the account managers and product managers at AWS gave me a very small taste for technical architecture, which really lit a fire in my belly (if you'll forgive me for melting pot of metaphors).

Fast forward twelve months and I’m sitting the exam in a few days (at time of writing, 9th January 2026). As part of documenting this journey publicly, I thought it was worth sharing the one thing that actually moved the needle on my practice scores.

The shift was this: stop thinking in services, start thinking in patterns. When I was memorising what each AWS service does, I was plateauing around 720–740. Once I started approaching questions at a higher level, and looking for architectural bottlenecks rather than a 1:1 service match I started consistently hitting 800+ in practices.

The method that helped most was working through practice questions and interrogating the wrong answers as much as the right ones. Not just “why is this correct” but “why is this wrong, and under what conditions might it actually be right?” It forced a deeper engagement with the material, the kind that starts to feel less like rote learning and more like actual understanding.

If you’re somewhere in the 70–75% range on practice exams and feeling stuck, it’s worth trying. The jump isn’t about knowing more services, it’s about thinking systematically about the problem.

The Personal Bit

If you’re here strictly for the technical content, this is a reasonable place to stop. If you’re here for a bit of everything, then please proceed!

I’ve just come back from the Christmas break, which gave me some proper time to reflect. 2025 was genuinely a good year. A few highlights worth noting:

• I got married. It was a brilliant day surrounded by the people who matter most.

• My cricket club got promoted after winning the division.

• I beat my reading challenge — seven books against a target of six. Not a huge margin, but I’ll take it, and endeavour to do better this year!

• My knee stopped hurting. This is more significant than it sounds.

2026 feels a bit more purposeful. The goals I’ve set are:

• Pass the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate exam

• Launch a cloud-hosted, multi-tiered web app (more on this soon)

• Hit a weight target by April

• Read 10 books

• Improve my systems thinking and writing

The reading and writing goals feel like the foundation for everything else. Writing clearly forces you to think clearly, and I don’t think you can write well without reading widely. Part of why I wanted this project to have a blog component is exactly that, it creates a forcing function. Ideas have to be thought through properly if they’re going to make it onto a page coherently.

This year I’m leaning more toward fiction. I’ve tried running non-fiction back to back for the past couple of years and found it tends to kill my momentum, if I don't dip back into fiction. I’ll share a proper reading list in a future post, but right now I’m halfway through “Assassin’s Apprentice” by Robin Hobb. The first thirty or forty pages were a bit of an adjustment — particularly coming off Dune, where the writing is comparatively direct — but Hobb is really leaning into with her world-building, and once I'm back in it, it's very immersive setting. It’s not quite the kind of book you lose yourself in the way Dune was, but it’s got a quiet pull to it once you find the rythym.

Until next time.

— Matt