When I was working FTE, I would often have blocks of time at work that I could use to study and “sharpen the saw.” Often, my employer would pay for various educational services and courses for me. They’d also set aside professional development time for me to utilize those resources.

Since returning to freelance work, I’ve not had such a luxury. For decades, I’ve been a member of the ACM and part of that membership has been access to a rotating door of online learning platforms. At the moment those are Percipio and O’Reilly. I make pretty poor use of these resources (even though I often recommend that people utilize them).

It’s been even more difficult balancing my time between several clients, being on-call, and personal matters. The days of being able to sit down and lock in for a couple of hours to study have gone away. What I do have, however, is a few moments of half hour blocks here and there that I could use to finally utilize the vast resources available to me.

The other night after I finished my client work, I sat down and wrote out a bit about the work I’m currently doing and how I might make myself more useful to my clients. Then I scanned a few web resources and started trying to cross reference some books and courses in the ACM Learning Center.

As a short summary, the last couple of months of my time has been split between a few large C# codebases, some TypeScript work, some smaller-cloud devops tasks, and some traditional systems/network administration. I’ve somehow ended up with an absolute mountain of Microsoft-adjacent work. Something I would’ve never guessed would have happened in my career.

After looking at the code and infrastructure I had been dealing with, I identified the following list of chapters, course sections, and resources that I’ll spend short time spans on studying while I have pauses through my days.

A lot of these are very basic but I have often found that going back and reading primers has given me insights that I forgot about or ignored. This is also about quick things that are less heady. I’ll find a way to get heavier focused learning worked into my routine eventually.

• C# In a Nutshell, Ch 14 (Concurrency & Asynchrony), C# async/await
• C# In a Nutshell, Ch 8-9, C# LINQ & Generics
• C# In a Nutshell, Ch 18, C# attributes & reflection
• EF Core in Action 2nd Ed, Ch 9, EF Core migrations
• Hands-on Azure Functions with C#, Ch 1-3, Azure Functions DI & lifecycle
• MS Learn: Durable Functions patterns, Durable Functions orchestration
• Azure OpenAI Service for Cloud Native Apps, Ch 2-3, Azure OpenAI SDK
• Building AI Apps with Semantic Kernel, Ch 1-3, Semantic Kernel basics
• pollydocs.org, Polly v8 resilience
• AI Agents in Action, Part 3, Agent eval patterns
• Programming TypeScript, Ch 1-3, TypeScript fundamentals
• tsconfig.json & TS docs, tsconfig.json & strict mode
• Learning GraphQL, Ch 1-4, GraphQL fundamentals
• Apollo Server docs, Apollo Server specifics
• Drizzle ORM docs, Drizzle ORM
• Drizzle docs (migrations), Drizzle migrations in practice
• Docker Deep Dive, Ch 8-9, Docker multi-stage builds
• DigitalOcean App Platform docs, DigitalOcean App Platform deploy
• Express 5 migration guide + Better Auth docs, Express 5 + auth review
• Stripe webhook docs, Stripe webhook patterns
• Vitest & GitHub Actions docs, Vitest & CI review
• Fedora Server docs, Fedora Server install & hardening
• Podman in Action, Ch 1-4, Podman fundamentals
• Podman docs (pods), Podman-compose & pod management
• Ansible: Up and Running 3rd Ed, Ch 1-4, Ansible fundamentals
• Ansible: Up and Running 3rd Ed, Ch 12, Ansible for network & multi-site
• Proxmox VE Administration Guide, Proxmox admin refresher
• pfSense: The Definitive Guide, pfSense / network fundamentals
• Industrial Network Security 3rd Ed, Ch 1-3, SCADA/ICS security awareness
• Mastering Windows Server 2022, Ch 17-18, Hyper-V administration
• Mastering Windows Server 2022, Ch 5-7, Windows Server AD maintenance
• MS docs on DFSR, DFSR troubleshooting
• ITAR/EAR overview (BIS + DDTC), ITAR compliance for IT
• Ansible docs (Windows/WinRM), Ansible for Windows
• windows_exporter GitHub, windows_exporter for Prometheus
• Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches 4th Ed, Ch 1-5, PowerShell for sysadmins
• Fedora + Podman monitoring (reuse City Electric blocks), Fedora + Podman monitoring deploy
• Packet Guide to Core Network Protocols, Ch 2-3 + Practical Packet Analysis 3rd Ed, Ch 3, Ethernet switching & VLANs
• Network Warrior 2nd Ed, Ch 11-13, Spanning tree deep dive
• Network Warrior 2nd Ed, Ch 6-7, Switch troubleshooting patterns
• TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1 2nd Ed, Ch 4 & 6, IP subnetting & DHCP
• Practical Packet Analysis 3rd Ed, Ch 4-6, Packet capture & analysis
• Network Warrior 2nd Ed, Ch 20, 802.1X & port security
• Kubernetes: Up and Running 3rd Ed, Ch 16-18, Practical K8s management
• Learning Helm, Ch 3-6, Practical Helm usage
• Terraform K8s provider docs + Terraform: Up and Running 3rd Ed, Ch 7-8, Managing K8s with Terraform