About
I am a motivated and dedicated individual with a background in biology teaching and high school basketball coaching, seeking to transition into a career in cloud architecture and DevOps. I recently certified in AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) and have strong communication, interpersonal, organisational, data analysis and data interpretation skills. I am eager to build upon prior teaching experience and technical knowledge to contribute to cloud architecture projects.
Skills
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) Foundational certification
I gained my AWS CCP certificate in January 2024 and completed my AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA)certificate in Feb 2025.
Science and Biology Teacher for 24 years
Taught in New Zealand and UK at 6 different schools
Experience of project management or operational management in a complex environment.
Balancing delivery of lessons to multiple stakeholders, including students, parents, senior leaders and govenors, of mixed age groups and abilities. Also having to manage data analysis, planning short, medium and long term objectives based upon that data.
Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, which engender trust and confidence with stakeholders, and the confidence to brief senior colleagues on complex information.
Fostering and maintaining excellent working relationships is essential for the smooth running of the workplace. As a teacher I had to gain students' trust in order to deliver the curriculum and coach in an engaging and accessible format. This also allowed me to give feedback to students and parents in a diplomatic way.
Strong analytical and data management skills; able to present and analyse complex data and large data sets, synthesise findings and develop recommendations for action.
Teaching allowed me to challenge myself when handling data- assimilation, analysing and summarising complex information to further improve my students understanding by targetting weaknesses in specific areas, and using that knowledge to plan how to bring out the best in them, and for them to achieve the highest possible results.
The ability to deliver operational excellence and project management for a large programme.
As head of Southerns House, managing multiple year groups and colleagues as tutors provided me with a challenge to engage, enthuse and encourage the students to participate in various sporting and academic events, to excellent success in the school house competition. I was also in charge of basketball at three schools, which had all year groups and levels of ability. I am proud to say that the programmes I set up had a large pupil uptake, and were very successful.
Education
B.Sc Zoology and Ecology, Canterbury University, New Zealand
Post graduate diploma in teaching and learning, Christchurch College of Education
AWS CCP, Solutions Architect Associate and Solutions Architect Professional course, Optima IT Training and Consultancy
Project 1: Resume website development and deployment on an S3 bucket
After being told about The Cloud Resume Challenge Guidebook for AWS by Forrest Brazeal, I decided to get it and have a go and the first "chunk" to have a go at was building and deploying a static website. I found this quite interesting. I haven't got any coding background, so this was learning another language which was pretty cool.
Using Codepen.io and W3schools.com to help with the .HTML and CSS coding for the website, I managed to get a website up and running and actually looking reasonably good! It was the next part that was the hardest thing for me to do. Deploying it onto a web server, saving it in an S3 bucket on AWS was ok but the code wouldn't work.
I tried and tried to figure out how to do it- lots of YouTube Vids going through the AWS Skillbuilder labs multiple times to help but the code wouldn't work. The Spartans of the Cloud WhatsApp group were brilliant- especially Craig S- and instead of using the native MacOS textedit I started using the Visual Studio Code programme and suddenly it all started to work. I now needed to improve my web page by adding a link to my CV in .pdf form and this was done through the using the Amazon S3 bucket endpoint and adding the .html code to allow it to be descernable! Great sorted!
Now how secure is the web page? At the minute it was only HTTP rather than HTTPS, so using AWS Route 53 I increased the security by making the website HTTPS. This involved getting a certificate from AWS Certificate Manager, adding it to the new AWS CloudFront distribution and then waiting for it to deploy within the distribution. Once that had happened it was then a quick add certificate and CNAME and now a CV has been formed!! So if you want to have a look at what I have done so far- go to https://colinkhenderson.click for a look at what I've done🙂
Personal Project for CloudTalents Bootcamp
I started the CloudTalents Bootcamp pro course which involves using various AWS services and more widely used DevOps services like Terraform, GitHub, GitHub Actions, and HashiCorp Packer to produce a photosharing app for a fictious start-up. This is all orchestrated by our mentor Fernando G, an experienced AWS engineer, who is there to help if needed.
Project 2a: AWS Landing Zone creation for CloudTalents Bootcamp
Using the CloudTalents bootcamp framework, I had to set up an Landing Zone for a fictious photosharing start-up using AWS Control Tower for ease of access to backend in a multi-account setup. I used OpenID Connect (OIDC), to allow GitHub Actions access to the AWS services for continual integration and continual development/delivery (CI/CD) of updates. This was quite a challenge and using the documentation and asking mymentor Fernando for advice, I managed to get the OIDC to work and the GItHUb Actions to proceed properly.
Project 2b: Terraform IaC setup of AWS Virtual Private Cloud and improve access using Resource Access Manager
Again from the CloudTalents bootcamp, I used HashiCorp Terraform as my IaC environment for automation for the set up of a VPC with 2 private and 2 public subnets and associated route tables and Internet Gateway. I used GitHub to manage changes to IaC, and using GitHub Actions to automatically deploy changes. I enjoyed using terraform and learning more about IaC and how easy it is to deploy various services just using code. Using AWS Resource Access Manager, I controlled access for other accounts witin the organisation to the VPC and was able to link them correctly for ease of access
Project 2c: Creation of custom Amazon Machine Image (AMI) using HashiCorp Packer
More new services to use! Using HashiCorp Packer to build and then deploy an AMI to launch a specific EC2 instance, using terraform and GitHub Actions. The services will be managed by AWS Systems Manager.
Project 3: Weather app design usingAWS Services, WeatherAPI, terraform, Apache AirFlow and Iceberg, and Snowflake
A personal project found in Medium which has a host of AWS services, use of Apache Iceberg and Airflow, using Snowflake as the datawarehouse and terraform to set up the IaC.