My Next Step in AI: Studying for the AWS Generative AI Developer Professional Certification

Why now? Over the past year, I've had the chance to build and experiment with several AI-based applications through hackathons, side projects and other hands-on exploration. That work gave me practical exposure to a lot of exciting subtopics such as: semantic/hybrid search, retrieval (RAG) workflows, LLM-powered applications and different real-world use cases for AI systems. I learned a lot by building and honestly, that has always been one of my favorite ways to learn. For me, knowledge expansion has always been a pipeline of Learn -> Build -> Refine -> Encounter problems -> Repeat. Now I'd like to formalize and combine this AI knowledge with my existing AWS cloud experience and that's why I'm starting my AWS Generative AI Developer Professional certification journey. Background My background is in cloud, software, and systems/solution architecture, while my recent work has pulled me further into the AI side of things. This certification feels like it'd help me bridge Cloud and AI wor