Derrick Williams started his tech career in the U.S. Army as an IT specialist - imaging machines, running cables and fixing printers. After he left the Army around 2018, he moved through contractor roles and eventually landed a security analyst position in San Antonio, Texas.
It was solid experience. He monitored security alerts, triaged incidents and documented threats, but the schedule was brutal: 12-hour shifts, rotating between days and nights, watching dashboards and waiting for something to break. The quiet stretches were the worst part. When his status update was "everything's fine", nothing was moving, and that included his career.
Starting straight away
Scrolling Instagram on a break one day, Derrick came across a video from Maximus on our team. It asked people to comment if they wanted access to a platform with projects you actually do. Derrick commented, got a response, and opened NextWork to pick his first project straight away.
He started with networking projects, because they overlapped with a university class he was taking and with his security day job. He configured subnets, routing tables, VPCs and CDNs in real environments, with step-by-step videos for whenever he got stuck. IP addressing stopped being a chapter in a textbook and became something he was debugging at 11 PM on a Tuesday.
Networking is still his favorite:
"I would say the networking projects are my favorite. I think networking is an under promoted skill because people like the thrill and title of security/cybersecurity but networking is the foundation of how everything involving cloud operates."
He completed about 20 projects, emailed our team for a personalized roadmap and worked through it methodically. Along the way he passed his AWS certification and started preparing for a security certification, using his projects as living proof of what the services actually did. Somewhere in that process, he stopped seeing himself as "just a security analyst" and started seeing himself as a cloud engineer.
The Muay Thai mindset
When Derrick interviewed for a cloud engineering role, Terraform was one of the requirements, and he was still learning it. So he told the interviewers exactly that, and then laid out his plan to get up to speed using NextWork projects.
He credits Muay Thai for that honesty. In the ring, whatever you're bad at shows up whether you like it or not:
"Either you present your weaknesses or they'll get exposed anyway."
He got the job, and shared the news with us:
"I am excited to share that I have been offered my first Cloud Engineering role. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff at NextWork for not only providing a platform to develop and refine my cloud engineering skills but also for guidance, mentorship and encouragement throughout this journey. Your support has been instrumental in helping me reach this milestone!"
Giving yourself grace
Today Derrick works a 9-to-5 as a cloud engineer, a long way from rotating 12-hour shifts, and he leads a Build & Brew group where learners build projects together each week. His advice for new learners comes from someone who learned around a demanding schedule himself:
"Don't overwhelm yourselves by trying to learn everything at once. And don't buy into the myth that we all have the same 24 hours. We all have high priority responsibilities we have to deal with everyday (Family, Finances, Health etc) so commit as much time as you can afford and give yourself grace."
Derrick, thank you for showing other learners that it's okay to walk into an interview while you're still learning.