Kyle M. Brown: Recent Episodes
None
Not the Money, the ModelRetirement isn’t a scam because the accounts are rigged or the math is hard. It’s a scam because of the deal underneath it: trade the best four decades of your life for the promise of freedom at the end a promise that arrives late, degraded, or not at all.
The deferred-life bargainThe standard script goes like this: work hard from 25 to 65, postpone travel, passion projects, time with family, and rest — then cash in your accumulated freedom in one lump sum at the end.
Look at what you’re actually trading. You give up your years of peak health, peak energy, and peak curiosity. In exchange, you receive freedom during the years when your body is slowing, your risk tolerance is lower, and statistically, your remaining healthy years are fewer than you think. Healthspan and lifespan are not the same number. Many people get ten good years after 65. Some get two. Some get none.
No rational person would sign this contract if it were presented honestly: Pay now with your strongest decades. Collect later, maybe, in your weakest.
Why the model existsThe 40-year deferral wasn’t designed around human flourishing. It was designed around industrial labor. Bismarck’s Germany set the first retirement age at 70 when life expectancy was far lower; retirement was a brief pension for the few who outlived their usefulness to the factory. The American 65 came from the same logic.
We inherited a model built for assembly lines and applied it to knowledge work, where the assumptions don’t hold. A software architect at 65 isn’t “used up” the way a steelworker’s body was. Meanwhile, the things we defer travel, creative work, time with kids are exactly the things that degrade or disappear with deferral. Your children are only young once. Your knees only work for so long.
The cliff is bad for you even when you reach itThe model fails on its own terms. Retirement, as practiced, is an abrupt cliff: full-speed work on Friday, nothing on Monday. The research on what follows is sobering: loss of identity, loss of structure, loss of social connection. Rates of depression rise after retirement for a meaningful share of people. Some studies link early full retirement to faster cognitive decline. The reward at the end of the deferred-life plan can itself be a health hazard.
We spend decades sacrificing for a finish line that, when crossed, often makes people lonelier and sicker.
What the honest deal looks likeThe alternative isn’t “never save” or “never stop working.” It’s refusing the deferral structure:
Buy freedom in installments, not a lump sum. Sabbaticals, mini-retirements, seasons of lighter work. Take some of your freedom at 35 and 45, when you can hike the trail and chase the kids, instead of banking all of it for 65.
Design work you don’t need to escape from. If the plan requires 40 years of endurance followed by escape, the problem is the work, not the absence of a beach. Autonomy, purpose, and pace are negotiable long before 65.
Plan for an off-ramp, not a cliff. Taper. Consult. Teach. Mentor. The people who age best rarely stop cold; they change gears.
Save aggressively anyway, but call it what it is. Money buys options at every age, not just the last one. The account isn’t the scam. The story about when you’re allowed to use your life is.
The real questionThe financial industry will keep debating contribution limits and withdrawal rates. That’s the wrong layer. The question worth asking is simpler: why did we agree to a contract that prices our strongest decades at zero and pays out in our weakest?
You don’t have to opt out of saving. You have to opt out of deferring. Freedom isn’t a retirement benefit. It’s a resource you can spend all along, and the version you can spend at 40 is worth more than the version you’re promised at 70.
I want to publish content for this site. That’s what it’s for but I don’t always have time for complete lengthy posts. This update soothes each of those problems.
What I’ve been focused on lately:
DevOps – Researched and developed proof of concept projects. Architected and implemented enterprise-scale processes, education, and, secure CICD Pipelines.
Cloud Computing – Researched and developed proof of concept projects for Amazon Web Services. Then acquired the Solutions Architect Certification.
Policy as Code – Research and development of the idea and proof of concept projects.
Kubernetes – Research and development of the idea and proof of concept projects.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn here.
IntroductionPractical skills are more valuable than theoretical knowledge. Credentialism (Degrees, Certifications, and titles) doesn’t equate to skills or ability when it comes to solving a problem. That is my belief after decades as a self-taught technical professional.
Having acquired the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate in 2022, I was pleased with the accomplishment but I understood that gaining practical experience typically should outweigh credentials.
One of the reasons I could acquire the certification with limited study was that although I hadn’t used AWS for complex workloads in the cloud, I could lean on lived experiences and a strong fundamental understanding of how the elements of the technology all fit together.
Since the level of effort required to acquire the certification didn’t provide as much education as I seeking, I set out to gain practical experience with AWS. One of the techniques that I decided on was to work through AWS Labs. I researched, analyzed, and tested from multiple sources around the web. Some were good, some were very poorly documented, outdated, and not very good.
During this time I discovered an interesting Reddit post that mentioned a Cloud Project Bootcamp starting in early 2023. So I did some research on the Instructor – Andrew Brown – looked into the curriculum, and decided that this appeared to fill the gap between certification knowledge and practical knowledge gained through hands-on problem-solving.
AWS Cloud Project Bootcamp ObjectiveMy understanding of the goal of the Bootcamp was to help students who have acquired associate-level knowledge or had acquired a certification and are at a point where they realize they need a cloud project on their resume, to progress their career goals. Or they want to gain hands-on experience working on a complex project.
Topics Covered Architecture – designing a system by translating requirements into required microservices and illustrating visually with diagrams. * Billing – understanding metered pricing, tracking spend, forecasting spend, reporting, and billing with Cost Explorer, CloudWatch Billing Alarms, and AWS Budget. * Containerization – makes applications portable across environments by tethering configurations and dependencies into a single unit called an image. * Distributed Tracing – a method that addresses logging data requests in microservice-based applications across an environment. * Decentralized Authentication – identity management service that is decoupled from the application. * Postgres and RDS(Relational Database Service) – a distributed Cloud service that simplifies the setup, operation, and scalability of several popular relational databases. * DynamoDB – Amazon’s proprietary NoSQL (non-tabular) database managed service. * Deploying “Serverless” Containers – Fargate (Amazon’s serverless Container offering) enables companies to run containers without having to manage servers. * Solving Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) with a Load Balancer and Custom Domain – CORS allows interactions between resources from different origins. Load balancers distribute network or application traffic across a number of servers. Custom domains correlate human-readable names instead of IP addresses with the AWS Route53 registrar service. * Serverless Image Processing – upload, store, and manipulate images with AWS Lambda and Sharp.js. * Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) with CodePipeline(CP), CodeBuild(CB), and CodeDeploy(CD) – CP is used to model and automate the steps required to release your software. CB is a managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, tests, and creates software packages that are ready for deployment. CD is a deployment service that automates code deployments to AWS or on-premises servers. * CloudFormation* – provides a common language for users to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment as code.
OutcomeI took a set of requirements for a fictional startup company to build a three-tier web application. Then leveraged the codebase of an existing on-premises (local) custom micro-blogging platform and integrated several microservices to meet those requirements.
Security best practices were discussed, evaluated, and leveraged throughout the entire implementation of this project.
I set up and configured Gitpod and Github Codespaces. The bulk of the integrations documented here were developed and tested in these environments prior to deployment to AWS Cloud.
I documented conceptual and logical diagrams of the architecture based on the requirements that were provided.
I studied and explored the AWS pricing, metered-billing model, and tools such as Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Cloudwatch Billing Alarms. I further leveraged these tools to forecasted potential spending for the aforementioned microservices and set up notifications using billing alarms and budgets.
I containerized the front-end (presentation tier), back-end (logic tier (and data tiers locally) and stored the container images in the Elastic Container Registry. I then deployed the application containers using the Elastic Container Service and Fargate.
I setup and configured several distributed tracing tools including AWS-Xray, Rollbar, Honeycomb, and activated CloudWatch logs for troubleshooting and monitoring.
I integrated AWS Cognito for decentralized JWT token-based authentication and removed the cookie-based authentication from the codebase.
I integrated AWS RDS Postgres database to hold all non-messaging data for the application. Non-messaging data includes elements such as activity messages, number of replies, user ID’s.
I integrated the AWS Dynamodb NoSQL database for all application messaging patterns. This includes creating, listing, and updating messages within the application.
I leveraged AWS Application Load Balancer so that the application would have performance efficiency and be highly available. This led to a series of cross-origin resource-sharing issues which I resolved by reviewing logs and troubleshooting. I also leveraged Route53 for its custom domain functionality to point users to crudder.net.
The application requirements include an option for end users to upload a profile image which is then manipulated for efficiency and storage. I used the API gateway to facilitate communications between AWS Lambda for authorization checks, Sharp.js for size conversion for thumbnails, S3 for storage, and the application interface for uploading and displaying the avatar.
I set up a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Pipeline using AWS CodePiepline to automate code build using CodeBuild and code deployment using CodeDeploy whenever future pull requests for code changes are made and accepted on the codebase repository in github.
Finally, I installed the AWS Cloud Development Kit and built several CloudFormation templates to automate all of the implementations referenced to the point.
References* A journal detailing the code, lessons, learned, and steps taken can be found at github at https://github.com/kmb40/aws-bootcamp-cruddur-2023/tree/main/journal * The code for the application can be found at github at https://github.com/kmb40/aws-bootcamp-cruddur-2023/tree/main * The application can be found at http://www.cruddur.net * Cloud Environments for local development: + Gitpod + Github CodeSpaces
https://certificates.saylor.org/921611bf-357e-45f9-8861-060160137329 Essentially what I found to be the most valuable parts of this course were the detailed look at the history of money, past and current monetary policies, and the impact they’ve had on global society. Additionally, the history of the Cypherpunks who laid the foundation for Bitcoin as we know it today, was insightful.
Circa 2006, a green junior executive is in a departmental meeting. The Executive Director states that the department just receive a 50 million dollar cut to the budget. She then challenges the team to come up with creative ideas and ways to continue to be effective despite this event. The green junior executive thinks to himself –… Continue reading Don’t be afraid to innovate while others tell you that you are wrong
The first time I heard the word Bitcoin was 2011 on a podcast called “This Week in Startups”. It’s actually still online at: It was trading around $5.81 at that time. As of the time of this writing, it is trading around $54k. If we use $50k that is an increase of 860485%. I thought… Continue reading I got orange pilled
Originally published on April 8 2007 on now defunct, adwords-articles.com. Republishing with minor tweaks and edits to links and some text. Ever Consider Google as your Big Brother? Well think again, what you will read here may surprise you. Google as your Big Brother? Remember the Novel 1984 by George Orwell ? This book describes… Continue reading Ever Consider Google as your Big Brother?
What is bubble.io? Bubble was founded in 2012. It’s a nocode / no-code / visual development application that allows non-technical creators to build web and mobile applications without writing traditional code also referred to as programming. Source – According to quikStarts At a higher level, Bubble is a tool that empowers creators to build software… Continue reading Bubble.io’s real power is in the database and API functions
Originally published on 2/17/2017 – Updated 1/21/2021 NOTE: Accept digital payments for Stripe and PayPal in the same form. A solution is now available at CloudSwipe.net No, Stripe doesn’t integrate with PayPal — we currently support credit and debit card payments. Don’t take my word for it. Patrick Collison – who happens to be… Continue reading Does Stripe integrate with PayPal (Updated 2021)
Nocode is a term that describes a method used by both computer programmers and non-computer programmers to build web and mobile applications (apps) using a graphical user interface instead of code. Nocode is also known as, No Code, No-Code, visual programming. The idea itself is not a new one. There have been attempts, or rather… Continue reading What is nocode?
I am sure that you have been reading and hearing a lot about remote work and remote education since the COVID – 19 pandemic began. I certainly have. In fact, I’ve been hearing about and talking about the pros and cons of remote work and education for most of my IT career. I’ve been in… Continue reading Remote Life in the Covid-19 era
Objective: To teach Javascript using code snippets with explanations for practical use. There will be random consistent updates made. I will try to answer questions in the comments section. Note: These are not theory based lessons. They are being shared for those that learn by looking at practical detailed samples, then doing. How to use… Continue reading Learn Javascript