What Do You Want to Learn?

This is a question I feel I don't ask myself enough. I think it would be very difficult to be in technology and not be committed to life-long learning. I love learning new things and creating cloud content, but I am generally learning and teaching topics that are driven by external factors. What the vendors are doing on their certifications and what the market is showing interest in usually direct what I am teaching and thus to an extent what I am learning. Don't get me wrong, it is awesome stuff, but what would I most want to learn about if there were no constraints? This is a question everyone who learns and takes certifications should periodically consider as well. Are you learning something you truly want to learn? So here are the top three topics I want to tackle:

1. Data Lake. If you are not familiar, this is massive scale storage, typically supplying a large-scale data analytics process. Think exabytes of data. I get the concepts, but it would be great to really dive in and understand use cases and case studies. This is the easy topic for me to tackle, but not the most interesting of the three.

2. Machine learning. This would be my passion choice. I love data analytics and did a fair bit of regression analysis in a former life. I have taught and worked with some machine learning tools, but never dove deep. The idea that you can take data and apply tools to the data and find hidden patterns that can help people and organizations is just cool. The cloud is a natural choice for the level of data storage and compute that is associated with machine learning, and the cloud providers all have machine learning tools and frameworks. This is my longer-term goal.

3. Designing a sustainable micro-service architecture. I love the idea of micro-services, and serverless cloud architectures are made for them. I can build you a micro-service. I can build you 10 micro-services. But how do you architect, build, and maintain a large-scale system of micro-services with dependencies in such a way that it is scalable, reliable, and updateable? I don't think that is easy and I want to master it.

Those are the three things I am most interested in right now. What are you interested in learning?