If you found your way here from Medium, you already know the backstory. The layoff. The relocation. The certifications. The grind.
If you haven’t read it, start there — it sets the context for everything here.
This site is the next chapter.
What This Is
Beyond The Cert is where I document what happens after you pass the exam. Not the study guides. Not the practice tests. The part that comes after — when you realize the certification got you in the door, but what’s behind it is a whole different conversation.
I’m a platform engineer at a Fortune 500 company. My world is Kubernetes — provisioning clusters, patching them, operating them at scale. Eight months into the role, I know exactly where my niche is.
And I can tell you that the CKA, as valuable as it was, only scratched the surface.
Real understanding comes from building. From breaking things at 11pm and figuring out why. From doing something manually until you understand it deeply enough to automate it.
That’s what this site is about. And honestly — it’s also how I fight imposter syndrome. Writing it down, building it in public, owning the gaps. That’s the whole point.
What You’ll Find Here
Technical deep dives written the way I wish someone had written them for me. Not just the commands — the nuances. The things that don’t show up in documentation. The questions I asked that took hours to answer.
The connections between what you learn in a homelab and what you see in production.
You’ll find the Kubernetes The Homelab Way series — a step-by-step guide to building a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster from scratch, written by someone who just did it. Every issue encountered. Every fix. Every nuance documented.
You’ll find posts about platform engineering, GitOps, observability, and the operational depth that keeps me up at night — in a good way.
A Note On This Site
You’re reading this on infrastructure I built.
This blog runs on a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster — physical machines on my desk, configured by hand, deployed through GitOps. Every post I publish is a git push that ArgoCD turns into a deployment.
That’s not a flex. That’s the point. I’m still learning. This whole thing is proof of that.
The best way to understand something is to run it yourself.
Come Along
If you’re grinding through certs wondering what comes next — this is for you.
If you’re early in your platform engineering career trying to build real depth — this is for you.
If you just want to see what a bare-metal Kubernetes homelab looks like end to end — this is definitely for you.
The cert gets you in the door. This is what’s behind it.
I’ll be here consistently this time.
Welcome to Beyond The Cert.
Let’s build.