It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and I feel that I’ve made a decent amount of progress despite a few roadblocks that I hit along the way.

Progress Since My Last Post

• Wrapped up Chapter 14: Maintaining and Optimizing Operating Systems

  • The final sections of this chapter covered backup and recovery in a general sense, as well as Windows specifics. I went ahead and took this chance to enable System Restore, Backup & Restore, and File History for the full suite of Windows backup and recovery tools. I also went through our family’s photos and got them all backed up locally, and to the cloud as well.

• Completed Chapter 15: Working with the Command-Line Interface

  • The Ubuntu virtual machine I set up came in handy immediately, I was able to jump right in and test Linux/Unix command-line tools.

• Completed Chapter 16: Troubleshooting Operating Systems

  • Went into some common troubleshooting procedures for Windows as well as troubleshooting common Windows issues. It also ended with a review of all of the hardware troubleshooting topics covered in the earlier chapters.

• Completed Chapter 17: Display Technologies

  • A lot of this chapter was review for me, but it did dive into projector types, components, and troubleshooting.

My First Case of Burn Out

I never realized that it was possible to get burnt out doing something I love. For about a week straight, I bit off a little more than I could chew (well a lot more than I could). I could tell that my fiancé was starting to get worn out, so I decided to try giving her as much of a break as I could, without slowing down in my studying at all. The result was what I believe was a week straight of 3 hours of consistent sleep each day. I felt completely fine doing this, until it was already too late. I was breezing through content and retaining what I was learning. Then I returned to work after a weekend off. I was exhausted on arrival.

I work an unconventional work schedule, which is a 12 hour shift (6PM to 6AM) rotation 2 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off on a repeating biweekly schedule. Turns out, 3 hours of sleep a day on a 60 hour total 7 day stretch is not sustainable, but was very easy to achieve by pure accident. I ended up having to take a few days off studying to relax a bit, especially after the work week.

From here on out, I’m going to have to be a little more systematic about how I handle my study time, making sure that I’m leaving time to at least get some sleep. What does that systematic approach look like? Well, I have no idea. It is so difficult to build a consistent study schedule when my work schedule is inconsistent by nature. Throw a baby into the equation, and structure has to take a back seat. Then there’s the goal of an entry level IT position, which would flip that whole schedule on its head. Not to mention, my study days are pretty much only relegated to my days off now.

What I learned the hard way is that I can’t be good for my family unless I am good myself. That’s where my biggest motivation for making this transition comes in. Providing better consistency for my family. If I myself am feeling the inconsistency of my own schedule and the time available for myself to spend with my family and pursue my studies, I can only imagine that they too feel that same inconsistency, especially when study takes away from family time.

Post Burn Out Progress

• After a short break, I tackled Chapter 18: Essentials of Networking

  • It covered host roles, NICs, frames (sets of data moved from one device to another, processed by NICs) in a general sense, Ethernet and the different Cat standards and cables, structured cabling, and the star bus topology.

• Started Chapter 19: Local Area Networking

  • I learned about IPv4 addressing, IPv6 addressing, subnet masks, and DNS. DNS ended up being part review from when I set up this domain name as well as building off the things I learned on that small side-quest.

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Scheduling My Exams, and Job Hunting

A few weeks back, I paid for my Core 1 and Core 2 exam vouchers, I just hadn’t had the time to sit down with my fiancé and figure out a good date for them. It was at this point I realized a problem. While this career transition was well thought out, I acted in haste, and unknowingly purchased a textbook for V14 of the exam which closes on September 25th, 2025. That is 12 days away from the time of writing. After which, V15 (220-1201 and 220-1202) will be the only exams available. My original plan was to schedule Core 1 for early December and Core 2 for Early January, but with this new discovery, I had to make a small adjustment. I opted to schedule Core 1 for Early January and Core 2 for early February. This should give me time to finish the book study, fill in any gaps between the exam versions, and leave me with a month to review my notes before each exam. I believe having a set deadline in front of me will help in keeping me moving forward to my goal.

The Resume and Job Search

I took a few days off studying to prioritize my job search. Since we are entering the “slow season” at my current job, my hours can be cut at a moment’s notice, without pay. I reached out to the different contacts I’ve made over the past few months about potential job leads, and…nothing. Initially, this was extremely discouraging. It isn’t a particularly good feeling to feel “stuck“ at a job that you don’t particularly enjoy, and one that very soon will not be paying the bills. I couldn’t even tell you how many jobs I’d applied for and only got standard rejections, or no response at all, and no feedback as to why I wasn’t considered for an interview. If I had to guess, the reason most likely comes down to other candidates having certifications, work experience, or college education that I do not.

This entire time, I’ve been updating the resume that I originally created in 2016. While I’m not sure if this is the case or not, it is possible that ATS systems were just throwing out my resume. I took some time to rewrite my resume from the ground up with formatting that can be easily scraped by ATS systems (at least I believe that’s the case). I realized that since I last updated my resume in June, my technical knowledge expanded by quite a bit. I created a new professional skills section where I listed all of the A+ content that I’ve learned in my studies that I am comfortable using in the workplace today. I also created a certifications section where I put my exam dates and the percentage of the way I am through my study materials so that hiring managers can see that I made both the time and financial commitment to this transition. After I applied for a handful of jobs, I noticed a very serious problem…

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When the Website On Your Resume is Broken

The link to my website on my resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, and e-mail signature, https://www.kylebouder.dev, which originally redirected to https://blog.kylebouder.dev was returning an invalid SSL certificate error, and I have no idea how long it’s been this way. I had this set up a very specific way previously. Hashnode’s SSL certificate is able to be passed to my own domain. For me, blog.kylebouder.dev pointed to hashnode.network, www.kylebouder.dev pointed to blog.kylebouder.dev, and kylebouder.dev also pointed to blog.kylebouder.dev. There were a few reasons why I did it this way initially:

• I didn’t have the knowledge of setting up a Web Server and getting a page live

• While I know my way around HTML and CSS, I am by no means a web designer (and don’t wish to be)

• I don’t feel like I enough to show where a landing page would be beneficial enough to justify the cost (at least not yet)

This setup handled SSL certificates for me, and allowed me to use my Hashnode blog’s home page as a temporary solution.

Identifying the Issue

The first thing I tried to do here was purchase my own SSL certificate and apply it to kylebouder.dev and www.kylebouder.dev. I figured, if the certificate isn’t being inherited correctly, surely providing my own paid certificate would be the most stable long-term solution to this problem, especially since they ended up not being terribly expensive. This would also allow me to have a self-sufficient domain that didn’t rely on other’s certificates. Once I applied my SSL certificate to kylebouder.dev and www.kylebouder.dev, I started receiving a new error: 404: Deployment Not Found.

The only other thing I knew to do at this point was to double-check my DNS records. I noticed that my ALIAS and CNAME records were pointing to a strange web address that I did not recognize, and definitely did not configure myself (a large string of letters and numbers.supersonic.ai). E-mail forwarding was also enabled and had a TXT record to a similar address. Oddly enough, my blog CNAME value was left intact, explaining why blog.kylebouder.dev was still functioning as it should. My immediate concern was that my site was hacked. Thankfully that was not the case.

After making sure the account was secure, I went ahead and began changing the configuration to what I had set it to originally. The result wasn’t what I expected though. Researching the address led me to discover that it was pointing to the free CDN service provided to me by my registrar. I wish that they didn’t change my configuration for me without any input or notification, but what’s done is done.

In hindsight, simply configuring the CDN would have solved this entire problem from the beginning. At least I know now what a Content Delivery Network is and why having one is beneficial.

When Fixing a Problem Creates a New One

Once my ALIAS and CNAME attributes were at their original values, a new issue emerged: An SSL certificate mismatch error. What ended up happening here was that my own SSL certificate was conflicting with Hashnode’s SSL certificate. The simplest solution would be to remove the SSL certificate from my domain and configure everything the way I had it before. Seeing as I had just purchased a 5 year certificate with the intention of future-proofing my domain setup, I decided against this. Also, I really didn’t want to waste that money. What I decided to do instead was to lease a Web Server from my registrar and build a simple landing page that links to my blog.

Building the Landing Page, and Learning cPanel

My landing page is extremely basic, it’s simply a header and two links. It isn’t pretty, but it’s much better than a potential hiring manager getting an SSL certificate error when trying to access my blog (which is extremely embarrassing, I might add…and may also have contributed to my lack of interviews). Setting this up required learning a completely new set of tools available through cPanel. I only poked around in the areas that I needed to configure to get things working, as the immediate goal was to provide hiring managers with anything that wasn’t some kind of error, but also got them to where they were intending to go .

I wrote a very simple home page in HTML and pushed it to my Web Server’s file system, and in an instant it was live. I then went into cPanel’s DNS records (which annoyingly is called Zone Editor and was quite difficult to find), and set up the proper redirect for the blog subdomain. After pushing all of the changes, I was a bit stumped because all of the DNS checking tools I’ve used in the past were showing that everything was correct, yet my blog was completely inaccessible. It dawned on me that the DNS checker would return that everything was functioning correctly if it were just a few minutes ago. Everything was working properly after overnight propagation.

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What’s Next

First and foremost, I need to continue pushing through this book. Once complete, I will check to see if any written material has been released for the V15 of the A+ exam (aside from the exam objectives, of course). I’ve never been big on reading, I guess all it took was finding the right kind of book. I am hoping that someone releases something with only the material that’s changed between the two versions of the exams. If I am unable to find anything like that, I will likely turn to Professor Messer’s YouTube videos, and use those to build my notes further. Also, some kind of website status reporting needs to be in order…

Lab Setup

I discovered that the small storage closet in my laundry room has outlets inside. What better way to study than to...take some of my fiancé’s storage space away and make a "server rack". This lab will provide me hands on experience with virtualization, networking, running cable, and Windows Server administration. I plan on creating a separate series of blog posts outlining the whole setup. From conceptualization to implementation, as well as documenting any potential issues and solutions. I’m particularly excited for this project, and I imagine that it will be a great way to review for the exam.

I have actually since discovered that the closet directly across from the one I mentioned has yet another set of outlets, which my fiancé was kind enough to point out to me. I am very grateful that she is so supportive of me setting up this lab. I don’t think she knows what she signed up for…

Memorization

While Obsidian has been a very helpful tool for gaining a deep understanding of these topics just by organizing my different notes and linking between them, although, this isn’t a complete replacement for “traditional“ studying. Something I’ve been doing on my work breaks is running through practice tests on various apps available for Android. The one I’ve been using the most is simply called “CompTIA A+ Exam Training 2024“. What I like about this one is that it keeps track of the types of questions I get wrong often. While most of these end up being topics I haven’t covered yet, the further I get into my book study, the easier it is to pinpoint my weak points. Some of my struggle areas are PCIe generation transfer rates, USB generation transfer rates, Cat rating transfer rates, UTP cabling standards T568A/B, and TCP/IP port numbers. For these, I intend on creating both physical and digital flash cards to practice with. Digital ones that I can access from anywhere on any device for personal use, and a stack of physical cards that my family can pull out and test me with randomly. I think this approach will work.

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I knew that this wasn’t going to be an easy journey, but I’m still all in, one cert at a time.