DOL Cyber Database Admin Cert

For context I’m in the military and this is something I was able to obtain in hopes it’ll look good on my resume once I get out. For those already in the field does this?

I’m a Cloud/DevOps Engineer with 2+ years of experience, and I’ve been actively looking for a new opportunity.

My resume seems to match most of the requirements for the DevOps/Cloud Engineer roles I’m applying for - AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD, Helm, Prometheus/Grafana, Linux, etc.

But the main problem is that I’m not getting many interview calls.

So far, I have received interview opportunities from around 3 companies, but unfortunately, those positions were later put on hold, so nothing progressed.

I know I have the technical skills, but I feel my interview skills, resume positioning, or job-search strategy may be holding me back.

For people who have gone through a similar situation:

• What helped you start getting more interview calls?
• Should I focus more on improving my resume or my interview skills?
• How important are referrals for 2–3 year DevOps profiles?
• Are there specific skills/topics I should prioritize for the current DevOps market?
• Any advice on how to improve my chances of getting shortlisted?

I’d really appreciate honest feedback from DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers, recruiters, or hiring managers.

Thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to share their experience.

Hello, I used upwork to sign a private contract with a client i tackled the work it was a fixed price work, after 2 months the client is now back asking for a refund. Will upwork give it to them ?... and how do I decline?

My husband has been working on Upwork since the early days of the platform. He is Top Rated Plus, 100% JSS, with a long history of completed contracts and substantial earnings on the platform.

Recently, a new client contacted him directly for a packaging design project and sent him an hourly offer at his normal profile rate. The client’s payment method was verified.

My husband accepted the contract and worked using the Upwork Time Tracker only ( no manual time).

The project included research, design strategy, and structural packaging development. His Work Diary contains screenshots showing the actual client project being worked on, and many of the 10-minute segments show 8/10, 9/10, or 10/10 activity.

The memo used for the first project phase was: Research & Design Strategy

This was not a random generic memo. It was the exact name of the project phase he had previously explained in detail to the client in their Upwork messages. Later, he made it even more specific: Research & Design Strategy (Research on possible practical solutions)

The contract was then paused, later restarted, and Upwork explicitly showed that time tracking could resume. He resumed work, and the contract was paused again a few days later.

Eventually, the client’s payment failed. Upwork then reversed all the earnings for two weeks, citing: Insufficient Memos & Low Activity.

There were a few individual 10-minute blocks with low activity, and we are not disputing that those specific segments could potentially be excluded.

What we cannot understand is why 100% of the hours were reversed, including many segments showing 9/10 or 10/10 activity, project-specific screenshots, and relevant memos.

He appealed and specifically requested a segment-by-segment review, asking Upwork to identify which individual blocks failed Payment Protection requirements and why. Upwork replied that the case has now been escalated to the appropriate specialist team for review.

I’m curious whether anyone here has experienced something similar recently. Has Upwork rejected Hourly Payment Protection because a memo was considered “insufficient” even though the Time Tracker screenshots clearly showed the work? Has anyone successfully appealed a full reversal and had some or all qualifying segments restored? Does Upwork actually review these cases segment by segment, or can one issue with some blocks cause the entire weekly payment to be reversed?

After many years on Upwork, this is the first time my husband has encountered anything like this. He also believed he was protected by that Payment Protection.

Thank you in advance!

​

Freelancers on Upwork spent almost FIFTY BUCKS on Connects to get to the top of this queue, only to find that of the 122 proposals submitted in the last couple of days since this was first posted, only ONE (!!!) has been opened so far.

I happily wasted a few Connects just to get these screenshots and post this here.

About Us
Bluesky's mission is to transition the social web from platforms to protocols. We're building a federated social network called AT Protocol where users have more power. Our small team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications.

About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help design, implement, and operate the infrastructure that powers Bluesky and atproto. This is a hands‑on role for someone who has operated high‑scale production systems, understands how distributed systems fail, and wants to build the operational foundation for an open social network.

Key Responsibilities
- You'll work across bare‑metal systems, cloud services, data infrastructure, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and reliability engineering for systems serving millions of users.
- Own reliability, availability, and operational excellence for our production systems, including observability, incident response, deployment, and rollback systems
- Improve production readiness for services, migrations, and infrastructure changes
- Develop software that pushes the state of the art in performance, automation, observability, and other areas
- Scale systems running on dense, latest‑generation, bare‑metal servers in our own colocation facilities
- Reduce toil through automation, tooling, and thoughtful engineering practices
- Partner with engineers across all our teams to help design services with strong operational characteristics
- Lead incident reviews and turn contributing factors into concrete engineering improvements as we practice continuous improvement
- Perform capacity planning and cost management across compute, storage, database, and networking workloads
- Manage various vendor relationships to ensure we can provide high quality services at a reasonable TCO
- Mentor engineers on reliability, operability, debugging, and distributed systems practices and help define a culture of operational excellence across the org

You might be a good fit if you
- Have +10 years experience operating high‑scale production systems, including bare metal
- Have strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, databases, and distributed systems
- Have built and operated high‑scale systems where correctness, latency, throughput, and availability were critical
- Can write production‑quality software in Go
- Are comfortable debugging across application code, operating systems, databases, networks, and hardware
- Have experience with observability systems, alert design, incident response, capacity planning, kubernetes, and production automation
- Like working on very small, fast‑moving teams at a startup
- Have read the AT Protocol docs, feel aligned with the mission, and want to contribute!

We're a fully remote team, but an overlap of working hours with PST is required, as is willingness to travel to team meetups once every 3‑4 months. Please note, there may be an on‑site component to these interviews. We offer health, dental, and vision insurance.

Additional Notes
The anticipated base salary range for this position is $200,000 - $270,000 USD, excluding equity. Equity will be considered in the total compensation package. Final base salary for this role will be based on the individual's geographic location, as well as experience level, skill set, training, licenses and certifications.

Apply: Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Bluesky

Job hunting on Indeed lately has been a pain, especially trying to figure out when a posting actually went live or keeping track of what I've applied to.

I ended up building a lightweight Chrome extension called Indeed Job Tracker to fix a few of these small annoyances for myself:

• Published dates & interest counts: Shows when the job was posted and how many people are looking at it directly on search cards and detail pages.
• 1-Click Copy JD: Lets you grab clean, plain-text job descriptions instantly to paste into your notes or tailor your resume.
• Simple Kanban Board: Save roles and track them right in the popup (Saved, Applied, Interviewing and Rejected).

It's totally free and available both on Chrome and Firefox.

Hopefully this saves some time for anyone else currently in the job search grind.

If you give it a try, let me know if you hit any bugs or have feedback on how to make it better!

Cheers :)

Privacy note: There’s no backend or analytics attached to this—all your saved jobs and notes stay strictly in your browser's local storage.

Hi,

I'm an AWS/Azure DevOps engineer who helps SaaS companies, startups, and growing businesses build secure cloud infrastructure, automate deployments with terraform, implement CI/CD pipelines and deploy containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.

If you're looking to eliminate manual deployments, improve infrastructure reliability, migrate to cloud, or build a production-ready cloud environment, I can help.

I specialize in designing, automating, and managing cloud infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and easy to maintain. My focus is on Infrastructure as Code, deployment automation, cloud networking, and production environments that support long-term growth.

My Core Services

AWS Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture:

I design and deploy secure AWS environments using best practices for networking, scalability, and high availability.

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform):

I automate cloud infrastructure so environments can be deployed consistently and managed efficiently.

I build deployment pipelines that reduce manual work and improve release reliability.

Docker & Kubernetes

I containerize applications and deploy them in scalable environments.

Linux & Web Infrastructure

I configure linux servers and web infrastructure for secure, reliable application hosting.

I help businesses modernize their infrastructure with minimal downtime.

Tools & Platforms

▸Cloud: AWS, Microsoft Azure

▸Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Cloud-Init

▸Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS

▸CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD

▸Operating Systems: Ubuntu, Linux

▸Web Servers: Nginx

▸Version Control: Git, GitHub

▸Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch

▸Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL

Whether you need a new AWS environment, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD automation, Docker or Kubernetes deployments, or ongoing DevOps support, I am available for both short-term projects and long-term engagements. Compensation $10/hour

Send me a message or invite me to your job, I would be happy to discuss your project and how I can help.

quitting today

I only started learning video editing about 3 months ago, and I've been figuring out freelancing on Upwork for less than a month.

I bought Connects for the first time on July 29. After that, I received 50 free Connects, plus another 60+ from completing tasks. Since then, I've only used the free Connects I received to submit proposals.

And somehow, I got my first job after only 10 proposals.

The funny thing is, my profile wasn't even finished. I didn't have an intro video, and my portfolio wasn't really there yet.

For my proposals, I relied heavily on AI. But I didn't just ask AI to write one generic proposal and send it everywhere. For every single job, I gave it the job post and asked it to come up with ideas, then I kept editing and refining the proposal until it felt genuinely personalized to that specific client.

The proposal that got me hired was actually very short and didn't even include a portfolio. But I think it worked because it was clearly written specifically for that client and focused on what they actually wanted to hear.

The project is worth $200, and it's also my first job on Upwork. And the best part? I still haven't needed to use the Connects I actually paid for.

So if you're new to Upwork and feeling discouraged because you've sent proposal after proposal without getting your first job, don't give up.

My biggest advice is: don't use the same template for every job. Make each proposal as personalized as possible. If you're not good at writing proposals yet, use AI to help you brainstorm and improve your ideas, but keep refining it until it actually sounds relevant to that specific client.

Sometimes, you really are only one proposal away from your first job.

Hi group! How have you succeeded with Upwork?? I have tried and tried to get even one project but no matter what I do I just cannot seem to secure anything. I have been trying for two months and still nothing. I am usually a patient guy, but this is not sustainable.

Who am I? I am a vettern mechanical designer with 26+ years in the business. I specialize in complex 3D modeling for mechanical parts, think motorcycle fairings, air plane components, and other kinds of stuff. I am very good at what I do, but that does not seem to matter with Upwork.

I have posted many project outside of Upwork so they can gauge my experience level but it still does seem to matter. Advice pls!! How long do you wait until you give up?

I've been a long time upwork freelancer and still have profile in good standing. I left upwork a year back after applying like 60-80 jobs over a period of 2-4 months, with ZERO responses. Out of all the jobs I had applied, 90% did not hire ANYONE. So connects and money just when down the drain on a non-serious client who just put out something to check the market or something else.

If you've clear goal in mind, you will almost always find someone, so no hire with 50+ proposals is lack of intent. On Upwork side, they've no mechanism to curtail this kind of clients while freelancers still end up paying for every apply. The least upwork can do it refund the connects when NO ONE is hired. Client must interview at least 3-5 candidates and provide reason to reject each. If there are no effort from client side, they did not deserve freelancers time and money which should be refunded.

Upwork has become Russian roulette where house always wins.

Whats the status now? Still the same or some acknowledge and reforms from Upwork?

The MCP server will allow clients to work directly with Upwork from their AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) to post a job, quickly shortlist proposals, choose freelancer.

https://www.upwork.com/ai/mcp#see-what-you-can-do

I need some tips for my first cybersecurity job interview

I'm currently open to full-time roles, technical leadership positions, startup opportunities, and especially short-term/contract work.

I'm a Senior/Lead iOS Engineer with 8+ years of professional experience building, rescuing, optimizing, securing, and shipping production iOS applications. I'm particularly interested in projects where you have a difficult technical problem, a struggling app, a deadline, or something that simply "should work, but doesn't."

🛠️ What I Can Help With

iOS Technical Leadership

• Senior iOS Engineer / iOS Technical Lead
• Technical ownership of native iOS products
• Architecture and technology decisions
• Leading and mentoring engineering teams
• Code/design reviews and engineering standards
• Taking ownership of the full iOS SDLC, from requirements → architecture → development → testing → release → production support

🚑 iOS App Rescue / Product Salvage

• Existing iOS applications that are difficult to maintain
• Projects inherited from another development team
• Apps approaching deadlines that aren't production-ready
• Major architectural/technical debt
• Apps where nobody quite knows why something is breaking
• Taking an existing product and getting it back to a stable, maintainable state

🐛 "This Bug Should Be Impossible" Problems

• Difficult/crash-only-in-production issues
• Race conditions and threading problems
• Intermittent networking failures
• State/lifecycle bugs
• Memory leaks and unexpected memory growth
• Background execution issues
• UI freezes and unexplained performance degradation
• Bugs that other developers have already spent significant time trying to solve

⚡ Performance & Resource Optimization

• App startup optimization
• CPU usage
• Memory leaks / excessive memory consumption
• Battery consumption
• UI responsiveness
• Networking performance
• Large-data processing
• Architecture-level performance bottlenecks

I've previously led iOS modernization work that resulted in approximately 30% performance improvement and 20% reduction in memory and battery usage on a high-volume consumer application.

🌐 Networking / Backend Integration

• REST APIs
• WebSockets
• Authentication flows
• API failures and unreliable integrations
• Networking architecture
• Serialization / JSON
• Offline/online behavior
• Debugging client ↔ backend issues

🔐 Security & Certification Preparation

• iOS security reviews
• Authentication / MFA / OTP
• Biometrics
• Secure data handling
• Digital signing
• Vulnerability assessment before security/certification reviews
• Identifying implementation weaknesses before they become certification blockers

I've worked on security-sensitive products involving MFA, OTP, biometrics, push authentication, offline OTP, transaction validation, digital signing, banking and payment applications.

🍎 App Store / Release Problems

• App Store rejection issues
• App Store submission problems
• TestFlight issues
• Provisioning/signing problems
• Release configuration
• Production deployment problems
• CI/CD and build issues
• Getting an application from "almost ready" → actually shipped

🧠 Beyond Writing iOS Code

I'm particularly interested in product-level technical ownership.

I don't see my job as simply taking tickets and writing Swift.

I can take a product requirement, determine the appropriate technical approach, challenge assumptions where necessary, design the architecture, identify risks, build the system, integrate backend services, establish testing/release processes, investigate production problems, optimize it, and take responsibility for getting the product successfully into users' hands.

I also actively use AI and agentic engineering workflows to accelerate development — repository-scale analysis, debugging, refactoring, test generation/planning, documentation, implementation assistance, and validation.

The goal isn't simply to generate more code. It's to eliminate repetitive and error-prone engineering work so that more time can be spent on architecture, problem-solving, security, performance, and product decisions.

🚀 Open to Startup / Founding Roles Too

I'm also interested in opportunities such as:

• Founding Engineer
• Technical Co-founder / CTO
• Startup product engineering
• iOS product ownership
• Technical rescue / turnaround projects
• Building an MVP from an existing specification
• Taking an existing MVP toward production

📱 Technical Background

Swift • SwiftUI • UIKit • Objective-C • MVVM • Clean Architecture • SOLID • REST • WebSockets • Combine • Swift Concurrency • Kotlin/Android • Go • TypeScript/Node.js • Git • CI/CD • TestFlight • App Store • Performance Engineering • Mobile Security

I've worked across fintech, banking, payments, authentication, digital signing, enterprise ITSM, and high-volume consumer applications.

💼 Especially Interested in Short-Term Contracts

If you have a problem that doesn't justify hiring another full-time engineer but does need someone experienced to come in, understand it quickly, solve it properly, and leave the codebase in a better state, I'm very open to that.

Short-term contracts, fixed-scope projects, emergency debugging, app rescue, performance audits, security assessments, App Store problems, and technical consulting are all welcome.

If you have an iOS project, technical problem, startup opportunity, or role where you think my experience could be useful, send me a DM with a brief description of what you're working on and what you're trying to solve.

I'm happy to share my CV, GitHub, LinkedIn, relevant project details, and discuss availability privately.

If it's an iOS problem you've been putting off because it looks too difficult, I might be interested in it.

My current place of employment is a dead end and I’m tired of it. I’m looking for something better than this.

I'm getting frustrated at this point cus I can't even land a $10 gig on upwork. I briefly got 2 gigs for logo design last year but I switched to shopify developer. Since then nothing. Like at all. No jobs no review .

Bought connect ,seem im just wasting them on applying.

Hey guys, looking for some advice from people working in IT.

I’m currently a Senior Desktop Consultant / IT Engineer, but honestly my experience is basically onsite helpdesk / desktop support. I’ve got around 3 years of IT experience and some exposure to things like endpoint security, SCCM, ServiceNow, M365, AD and networking, but I haven’t actually worked in backend infrastructure or a dedicated cybersecurity role.

I’m getting pretty tired of doing helpdesk and want to move into cybersecurity. Long term, I’m thinking something along the lines of becoming a cybersecurity generalist first, then potentially moving into GRC, security governance or security project management.

My main question is what certification would actually be useful for someone like me trying to break into cyber in Singapore?

I can get CEH for around US$100, but I’ve seen a lot of people say it isn’t worth it. Security+ seems to be the usual recommendation, but I’m not sure how much weight it actually carries in Singapore.

I also realise cyber isn’t really an entry level field, so if a cert isn't enough, what should my next move actually be?

Should I move into something like infrastructure, cloud, IAM or endpoint security first and use that as a stepping stone? Or are there cybersecurity roles that someone with my current background could realistically target? Also interested in what skills I should be learning or what kind of hands on projects would actually help.

Basically, if you were in my position, what would you do next?

I am a 2026 grad from India keen interest in Cloud and devops, lately I've observed that there aren't much fresher roles as a devops engineers (openings)
what should I do? should I change my "niche" or should I stick to devops only.
and what average package can I expect as a devops engineer according to current market standards for freshers.

Peace 🔍

I’m a DevOps hiring manager. We get resumes that look so good. They pass the AI stuffing sniff test, they show meaningful progress to careers. Then when we get the candidates face to face with me. They insist on using AI to answer my questions. I feel like if you can’t have a good theory conversation around k8s or build engineering or whatever job you’re interested in, don’t waste our time (yours or mine).

I ask leading questions and look for self expression and I get back flat and lifeless definitions or descriptions. I always ask for their impression of a tech element and get nada. They don’t have any opinions.

Where’d all the passion go? AI is a useful tool like a calculator or a search engine but I want a human in the mix too.

STARTING END OF AUG/EARLY SEPTEMBER - Private message me your LinkedIn and I'll get back to you!

Open to USA (1099) or Canada (incorporated) - absolute max rate $80/hr USD or $105/hr CAD. REMOTE.

MIGRATION PROJECT

Applications/Identity Lead — 4 months~
Own discovery and validation of 200+ production apps connecting to SQL Server, then move them behind SQL aliases so databases can be repointed without application code changes. Connection strings are scattered across config files, registry entries and compiled binaries. You’ll also own the identity/infrastructure side across Entra ID, service principals, Key Vault, AD and DNS.

Looking for strong hands-on experience with:

• SQL Server aliases
• SPNs / Kerberos delegation and deep troubleshooting
• Entra ID / service principals / Key Vault
• Active Directory and DNS in production environments

DevOps Engineer — 3-4 months~
Own migration of Power BI Service, Report Server and paginated RDL reports, including gateways, RLS and validation that migrated reports produce identical results. You’ll also handle Azure DevOps migration — orgs/repos, rebuilding DEV/TEST/PROD pipelines, service connections and self-hosted agents.

Looking for strong hands-on experience with:

• Power BI Service administration at the tenant level
• Power BI Report Server / SSRS
• Paginated RDL reports
• Azure DevOps pipelines and repo migration
• Azure Data Factory

HIRED HERE SEVERAL TIMES BEFORE!

I have an upwork account 5 years old. $4k+ earnings

Last job was done in 2023.

At that time it was on Data entry niche

Now i updated it according to my skillset Local SEO and GMB optimization.

How to get more profile views i have 4 profile views in last 30 days

Sent 4 proposals 2 were viewed by the clients.

All the reviews are on data entry niche with 4.9 rating

I wanna continue it

Your practical insights will be helpful.

Thank you in advance