{"id":687,"date":"2021-10-15T14:58:08","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T13:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.labtinker.net\/?p=687"},"modified":"2021-10-15T14:58:08","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T13:58:08","slug":"just-enough-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/?p=687","title":{"rendered":"Just Enough Education…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

‘Just Enough Education to Perform’ is either one of Wayne Rooney’s tattoos or a Manic Street Preachers’ song, I forget which, but I often feel this way in IT. Let me expain. If you work in IT you generally know a few areas of it very well, others less well, and others just enough to get by. It’s a broad church, you can’t be an SME about everything especially when people keep finding new things for you to be ignortant about: blockchains, Kubernetes, and the latest five services they’ve launched this week on AWS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TLS is something I know\/knew well enough to get along: TLS handshakes, cipher suite strengths, raising CSRs, SSL bad, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 good. But I knew enough to know I didn’t really know that much, I knew I had just enough education to get by (Sorry, had to work that in). I thought I’d learn more and tried an online course but gave up on it after thirty minutes of listening to someone drone through a couple of slides. And then I found a course by Ed Harmoush which seemed outrageously priced for someone like me used to spending $20 or $30 on Udemy. (Nothing against Udemy, it’s very good for a lot of things and that wasn’t where I’d got my previous TLS course from) However, two things occured. I heard Ed Harmoush speaking very lucidly on Packet Pushers about TLS 1.3…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/packetpushers.net\/podcast\/heavy-networking-594-tls-1-3-down-deep-with-ed-harmoush\/\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

…and I found an article in the Sunday Times on how to reclaim back money on old travellers’ cheques. I happened to have $150 of these in a drawer that I’d given up trying to redeem and yet American Express came good and gave me the cash back. Ed’s course is $297 but there’s a $100 off if you get the coupon from the link above (If work is paying maybe give Ed the full amount). and with that and the windfall from the TCs I decided to take a punt on his course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even with the coupon it was still ten times what I’d spent on the previous TLS course and yet, dear reader, worth every penny. Good teaching, like acting, looks easy when it’s done well. Breaking down complex subjects and presenting them in an engaging and digestible manner takes thought, preparation and expertise and it’s all on view here. A lot of techie courses I consume like cod liver oil tablets: reluctantly. This I genuinely enjoyed. I knew a fair bit about TLS already but nowhere near as much as I thought and there were areas that I’d totally never heard of… Certificate Transparency. Never come across it… maybe I should have, I don’t know… but every certificate that’s minted is kept in a blockchain like register that anyone is welcome to query: have a go:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/crt.sh\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have no affilitation to Mr Harmoush and so my recomendation of his course is based purely on my own experience. If you want to become a bit nearer to being an SME in TLS (a pretty fundamental area of IT) then I strongly recommend you take this course:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/classes.pracnet.net\/courses\/practical-tls\/dashboard<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Just Enough Education to Perform’ is either one of Wayne Rooney’s tattoos or a Manic Street Preachers’ song, I forget which, but I often feel this way in IT. Let me expain. If you work in IT you generally know a few areas of it very well, others less well, and others just enough to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encryption"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labtinker.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}