AWS Solutions Architect Associate

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Same progress on every computer. To mark a day done by hand, edit progress.md on GitHub and add a line like - Day 3 (2026-11-14) under "Completed days". Claude does this for you at the end of every session.

Open Claude and say AWS Day 1 (or whatever day you're on). Claude tracks where you are, what you got wrong, and what to review.

1. Learn (25 to 40 min). Claude teaches the day's topic in plain English, compared to stuff you already know (Cloudflare, your sites). Then you watch the matching part of the free course.
2. Build it yourself (30 to 45 min). You type every command and click every button. Claude explains, you don't paste.
3. Break it (10 min). Claude has you break something on purpose and figure out why from the error.
4. Prove it (10 to 15 min). 10 exam-style questions plus 3 interview questions you answer out loud, in your own words. Anything you miss goes on your review list.

Saturdays: review the week, redo one lab from a blank screen with no help, and do a mock interview.

• Billing alarm on Day 5, before anything else gets built. Set it at $5.
• Anything marked costs $ hourly gets deleted the same day you build it.
• You type it, Claude explains. No pasting code in. Interviews will ask you to explain your work.
• If you can't explain something out loud, you don't know it yet. That's fine, it just goes on the review list.
• Missed a day? Don't skip ahead, just slide. Exam date can move (AWS lets you reschedule free up to 24 hours before).

• Claude: main teacher, quizzes, mock interviews, explains every wrong answer.
• freeCodeCamp: AWS Solutions Architect Associate course (Andrew Brown): full free video course on YouTube. Your "watch" part each day.
• AWS Skill Builder (skillbuilder.aws, free account): the official free Exam Prep Standard Course and the Official Practice Question Set.
• AWS official exam guide + sample questions: the exact list of what's on the test. We check every topic against it.
• AWS docs and FAQ pages: for anything the course skims over. The FAQ pages are written almost like exam questions.
• AWS Well-Architected Framework: the "how to design it right" rules the whole exam is built on.
• AWS free plan: new accounts get free credits to practice with. Plenty for this plan if you delete stuff after.
• Only thing worth paying for: Tutorials Dojo practice exams, around $15. The closest thing to the real test. Buy it around Christmas.

The exam doesn't test all of these, but junior interviews do. Each one is built into the days above, and Claude will drill you on them until you can explain every one out loud.

• What happens when you type a website into your browser, step by step
• DNS record types: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, NS
• HTTP status codes: 200, 301, 302, 400, 401, 403, 404, 500, 502, 503, 504
• Common ports: 22 SSH, 80 HTTP, 443 HTTPS, 3306 MySQL, 5432 Postgres, 3389 RDP
• TCP vs UDP
• Public vs private IP addresses, what NAT does
• CIDR: what a /16, /24, /32 mean and how many addresses each has
• Linux: ls, cd, cat, grep, chmod, chown, ps, top, df, du, systemctl, journalctl, curl, ssh
• "The website is down. How do you figure out why?"
• Security group vs network ACL
• Scaling up vs scaling out
• High availability vs fault tolerance vs disaster recovery
• What a load balancer does and why you'd use one
• IAM user vs role, and why you never put access keys in code
• Encryption at rest vs in transit
• Backups vs replicas
• SQL vs NoSQL, and when you'd pick each
• RPO vs RTO
• What a container is vs a virtual machine
• Serverless: what it is and when it's a bad idea
• How you'd cut a company's AWS bill
• Git basics: commit, branch, pull request, merge
• Tell me about a time something broke and you fixed it (your real client stories)
• Walk me through a project you built (your AWS project + Film Timeline)

• Jan 16 to Feb 28: Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker. Rebuild one of your real projects on AWS as code.
• March: portfolio write-up on zackhaynie.com, resume, LinkedIn, mock interviews. Start applying.
• April: applying full time and interviewing.