SCRUM, the art of doing twice the work in half the time, because you're a god damn madman

“Why Master Wayne, do we fall?” “Because we aren’t pushing ourselves hard enough Alfred”

• Not a Quote

So how are you casual reader? I saw you did that thing you wanted to do and I am very proud of you! it’s been some time since I updated my Blog. Things have been ‘busy’ as a relative term but all quiet when it comes to getting a new job.

Why did I title this post in such a manner?

Well I am talking to myself about ‘realism’ lets be honest, trying to get a new job while in lockdown just isn’t going to happen. I try very hard and get very little back regardless of how many Job Aggrigator sites I am a part of (Linkedin included).

I grow tired of YEEETing my CV out into the blackness of the interweb as such I have been upskilling in more ways then one.

I tought myself how to make a better CV (Currently V7 ‘Pentester Class’), tailor it to my very particular set of skills:

In addition I can now pull off a good cover letter and while both of these things will get me in the door but I also need some ‘flashy’, ‘jump out and stand out’ qualifications to also make those CV Skimmers pass my details onto a recruiter or other human (Yes all websites and most recruiters use keyword searching and crappy bots that cant parse columns and other ‘fancy’ formatting).

Step in my Highlight of the Month Cybrary fanfare rap horn pap pap pap

Cybrary has free courses each month and me with my dirt Poor status (Dirt poor meaning bills paid but not a lot of disposable income) needs all the help it can get.

Why SCRUM though, its an actual technical term for pushing staff??

Well I want to pick up 2 certifications* this month as a minimum and as they are both free this month only I have to work hard.

Cybrary for the month of November (in our year 2020 known as THE ENDLESS YEAR) are offering CompTIAs Network+ and also Security+, my brains immediate thought was to enroll in both and hit them hard.

I then saw that Network+ was 64 hours and Security+ was an additional 45 hours.

Sh*t!

Never the less, I was an man on a mission, I elected to take Network+ fistly being the longer course but also the thing I had slightly more familiarity with.

I quickly learned that these courses, while comprehensive in the detail were also very forgiving in the labs, an hour here, more hours there. If you cut down on lab time (by working through them fast) you can get them done real quick.

I started OneNote my trusty Note Taking app (Shout out to @LabEveryDay) set the video to 1.5x speed and allowed myself to open up and absorb all the information.

Within a few days I have picked up Network+ (You can check this on my accredible.net account if you like I try to add everything I get there)

That thing kicked my ass but I managed to get passable scores on the practice testing so I can say with confidence that with a little more flashcard work and a deadline of actual real exam I could pull off a pass.

So next up is Security+, this one I am focussing on expressly which is why I decided not even 14% into the course that I would press pause and pop out a quick blog post update.

I may do a seperate post on how I Scrum my Learning… screw it I’m telling you here and now.

This method works better if you’re not on a deadline though there are large parts of things I already know from other learning and experience.

Scrum?

Some people know what this is others don’t, quick TL;DR

Scrum is an agile framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products, with an initial emphasis on software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing and advanced technologies. It is designed for teams of ten or fewer members, who break their work into goals that can be completed within timeboxed iterations, called sprints, no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks. The Scrum Team track progress in 15-minute time-boxed daily meetings, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds sprint review, to demonstrate the work done, and sprint retrospective to improve continuously.

Quoted from Wikipedia, I can skip the meetings part as I’m the only one Scrumming so I just get up and have a Jammie Dodger or something.

It could be that my brain is mislabelling this as just learning real-real-hard-in-a-short-amount-of-time-so-screw-it-call-it-the-one-technical-term-you-can-think-of-on-the-spot-bang-it’s-scrum.

Focussing my efforts into learning, playing content at 1.5x - 2x speed (like a psycho) helps me burn through a task and actually get it done!

The way I do this with video content and where I control the learning, I blast through the content once and screenshot everything for reference.

Once you burn through a 64 hour course in about 4 half days you can pop all the screenshots in to OneNote and then go over things that don’t make sense (in my case this is little as this is basically how I learn (Visual Learner)) and add additional text notes, diagrams and arrows to your notes (love OneNote).

Then I sat in labs for a little while. A lot of the lab work made sense to be and where I had an hour I was usually done and working in about 15minutes, I did have on that was a pain but it was still only half an hour and done, some tasks when you know what you’re doing just don’t take long.

After note taking and #LabEveryDay I took try 1 of the practice tests, Needless to say I was not familiar with the exam layout or anything so scored 63%, not bad but needs work.

After a quick google I found multiple examples of questions for the exam on the flashcard learning website: https://quizlet.com which had actual practice exam questions, so after some time I learned just about every one that I could find. Taking Practice Exam 2 scored an acutal pass grade but even threw new curve balls at me.

So that is how I passed Network+ Certification* in days.

Now I intend to so the same with Security+ and the remaining 12 days of November.

Wish me luck and I hope this helps someone fining it hard to cram, hell if this post gets views I’ll consider it helping people.

When I have more time ill come back to this post and tidy up any spelling mistakes or after a reread does it even make sense sort of things.. need to rush that Security+ isn’t going to learn itself!

Note:

• Qualifications and Certifications picked up from Cybrary cover learning all the material and passing practice exams to get you ready to splerge on the actual professional ‘here’s a certificate and plastic card’ examinations, for me this side can wait, who has £200 to just drop on Security+ or Network+ or even more on something like OSCP drools….. probably them people dropping an entire wage on a PS5 or XBox Series X…..