Wassim

It has been a year since I started listening to David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me audio book. On my birthday, I decided to integrate at least some of his suggestions into my daily life and endure the necessary pain. My accomplishments a year ago So far, and with the Grace of Allah, I’ve accomplished the following things for the duration of a year now: I’ve always stood up in public transportation, even when the whole wagon was empty. My daily commute time is around 40 minutes per direction, five days a week. No matter how light or heavy my bag is, I always stood up. I’ve done five additional prayers each day, as a way to ask Allah to forgive my wasted years between my childhood and early college years. I switched to a keto diet and never got back. Since then I never cheated. No pasta, no fruits, no ice cream in summer, no soda, etc. I’ve worked out at least four days a week, for 15 minutes of HIIT training, except on the days where I was sick or had headac...

I decided to pause tracking my time for a couple of months and see if there are any benefits. Well I had a sense of loss. It is true that I had less anxiety. But at the same time, I felt like I was losing something precious. I guess the fact of tracking my time helped me value my time more than ever before. So I am getting back tracking my time, but not for all projects. The reason why, is that I now know how much time some projects take. For example, it takes me around 45 minutes to do 15 minutes of Insanity Max and take a cold shower right after it. This time, I am going to track the projects where I lack any sense of measurements, or where I need to evaluate my performance, for example study time .

I am a conscious fucking hardcore procrastinator. In my childhood, I started Karate, reached the blue belt, and quit. In my teenage years, I started Tae-Kwon-Do, reached the orange belt, and quit. One of my training colleagues continued to the end. Years later and before my marriage, I subscribed to Tae-Bo workout in my neighborhood. Guess who was the trainer… Palma Gym, Tunis I started swimming in my college years. I trained every other day the whole week before going to classes. Then I quit. I planned to do certification exams and find me sit for the exam years later. The Wireshark exam is the best example. I wanted to start my CCIE journey a decade ago. I still did not even start reading a single CCIE-level book. I wanted to build a multi-vendor home lab. I downloaded a lot of images but still have nothing built at home. Setting my own deadlines does not work for me. I find myself rescheduling them over and over again. As I explained in my previous blog post “ Why I Stopp...

Since a couple of months I am comparing my income to the average IT salary in Germany. I used the following sources for my research: Glassdoor.de, Kununu.de and various web search results. I am not sure if the statistics on Glassdoor are relevant enough. I looked at them with a grain of salt. It says that the average Network Engineer salary is about 58,500€, which is composed of a base salary of 57 500€ and an average bonus of 1000€: Glassdoor: network engineer salary in Munich It felt not bad to know that my salary is not far from the average in the industry. But apparently the Network Engineer job is financially not really rewarding anymore in Germany, according to Computerwoche . They say that the best salaries in IT are made by Consultants earn around 75,500€ yearly, followed by IT Security Experts with 69,900€, then Software Developers with about 68,500€. There was no mention of regular network engineering that do daily support activities like myself. From what I’ve read on...

I started building my skills in wireless networking. Target would be to review the basic theory first. I decided to use the CWT exam syllabus as a blueprint. It looks to have interesting material. I started reading a digital copy of the latest CWT study guide by Sybex. Let’s see if I can get the CWT cert before the end of the year.

First, why the cloud track? Just like you must learn German to understand the culture of Germany and interact socially with people, I must learn the cloud language to be able to interact with cloud engineers. Cloud skills are in demand. No doubt about it. Why Microsoft AZ-900 exam? my company offers free vouchers to all employees as part of a big Microsoft partnership up-skill plan. Microsoft is the second largest public cloud provider in the market and is increasingly gaining market share and maybe could catch AWS one day. My Microsoft Certified Professional title expired with Windows XP (Rest In Peace). So a new Microsoft cert in my resume would be nice. Learning material for the AZ-900 exam Microsoft free learning offering here Internet search in the Microsoft website to find definitions of Azure services. Youtube videos this Free practice tests: this this My preparation method Exam day Since I took the proctored online version, I had to prepare the exam environment myself, from pho...

Many years ago I have been trying to build a better career, a better health, etc. and sacrificing family time. I used to negotiate with my wife the fact that I needed some time to myself. I needed to work harder, in order to achieve better results. However, I noticed that my relationship with my spouse and children was deteriorating. My wife started telling me that there is a bigger and bigger psychological gap between me and my older son. She also told me I was getting a “bit” more aggressive. She was right. I did not notice all of that. That’s normal, I was living inside my head for a long time. I focused my efforts on two areas, and neglected my family. I was taking my family’s happiness for granted. I was physically there but emotionally absent. Now I decided to change this. I decided to slow gears and focus on my family more than on my career. I even now refuse to change jobs if the new potential job role would not bring me the balance to enjoy family time. ...