Chasing Gold

Golden Kubestronaut sounds like a trophy you lift at the end of a hallway.

What I have is a calendar with too many mornings that start the same way: coffee, quiet house, a browser tab I am pretending is just another Tuesday, and a little knot in my stomach that knows it is not.

The end of the road has a nice name.

The middle has a proctor, a timer, and me negotiating with my own hands.

How the hallway found me

I didn't start with gold.

I started the way a lot of these stories start: curious, slightly underprepared, and convinced that wanting it badly enough was a strategy.

Early on I sat CKA and learned, with arithmetic, that the terminal does not grade enthusiasm. The score was the kind you don't put on a sticker. I told myself a story about nerves and timing and moved on like anyone who has ever closed a results tab a little too fast.

Then I found the other door on the same campus.

KCNA. KCSA. Both first pass. Clean. The kind of clears that rebuild a person's faith in cause and effect: study the material, recognize the patterns, collect the proof. Suddenly the roadmap looked less like a wall and more like a hallway with lights on.

I liked those lights.

I'll be honest — I also liked what they might mean to other people. For a long time I thought I needed that. Not always the public parade. Sometimes just the quieter theater: saying the names in a conversation and watching eyebrows do something approving. Treating outside recognition like the scoreboard that made the hours real.

Ordinary hunger. Not a villain origin story.

Just a person who works hard and wants someone else to nod.

Atlanta

KubeCon in Atlanta, early last November, did something the study guides couldn't.

Hallways full of the ecosystem I'd been collecting in logo form. Talks that made the abstract feel nearby. That particular conference energy where everyone is exhausted and overcaffeinated and somehow more sincere about infrastructure than should be legally allowed.

It reignited the chase.

Not in a cinematic rain-on-the-window way. More like: I flew home carrying a quieter, stubborner version of the same want — Golden Kubestronaut as a real finish condition, not a joke I made at myself in Slack.

The title stopped being coveted in the abstract.

It got a calendar.

The stretch where I looked unstoppable (to me)

What followed was a winter run.

I'd clear one, schedule the next, clear that too. The kind of streak that makes you rearrange your LinkedIn About section in your head while the result screen is still loading. Kitchen-cocky. Private parade for a man who had discovered PDFs and mistaken momentum for destiny.

Even the misses behaved.

Fail on a Tuesday. Pass later that week. The material was still warm. The bruise didn't linger. And part of what healed so fast was still that audience in my head — the imagined future where the logos spoke for me so I wouldn't have to.

That version of the path felt like a system I understood: put time in, get proof out, cash the proof with the world.

I liked that system a lot.

It liked me back often enough to be dangerous.

The week I put the laptop down

Then there was the certification that turned into a December residency.

Attempt. Miss. Attempt. Miss.

One sitting landed so close to the cut score that I laughed out loud at the laptop — the ugly laugh, the one you do alone. Close enough to taste it. Far enough that the hallway got a new painting and a longer rug.

Nobody else was in the room for that laugh.

That mattered more than I wanted to admit.

Then I did something my streak-brain hated.

The week between Christmas and New Year's, I left the computer at home and went to Disney World with my family. Ten years married. Anniversary on New Year's Eve. No portal. No "just one more practice quiz" in line for a ride. Just the ordinary miracle of being present while a theme park tries to extract your soul through soft serve and scheduled joy.

I flew home on New Year's Day.

Got the kids to bed.

Sat down late, still half in airport-brain, and took the exam again — not for a parade, not for a post, for me. A quiet little act of spite toward a cut score that had been rude to me all month.

Passed.

Which is a much better New Year's story than the one where I spent the holidays refreshing a browser. Also funnier. The mouse ears came first. The vengeance came after bedtime.

The pass felt good.

What surprised me was how little I needed it to perform for anyone else. The relief was quieter. Local. Mine. Earned on a night when the only audience left awake was me and a stubborn spreadsheet.

The other room

Practical exams are a different building on the same campus.

You don't get four tidy options.

You get a terminal, a clock, and a cluster that will not be impressed by how well you can explain Services at dinner — and will not care what your profile looks like afterward either.

I had already visited that room once, early, before Atlanta lit the fuse again.

I have visited it since.

The score barely moved. If anything, it edged the wrong way across more than a year, which is an impressive talent I did not request.

There is no elegant way to narrate that to an audience.

That's sort of the point.

You can't outsource the humiliation or the improvement. You study. You build labs. You believe the gap is closed because you can feel yourself getting better in private. Then the timer starts and your fingers go looking for a version of you who existed in the docs, not in the shell.

Afterward I do what any serious engineer would do.

I reorganize something in the homelab and call it processing.

The spreadsheet I pretend isn't emotional

I keep a plain file of attempts.

No streak flames. No motivational quotes in the header row. Just dates and outcomes.

It is the least flattering system in my life, which is why I haven't deleted it.

Progress bars forgive you.

Other people's timelines forgive you.

This thing does not.

It will happily sit a great month of passed logos next to a morning that went sideways in a shell, and it will not apologize for the whiplash. That honesty is rude. It is also the only scoreboard I'm willing to trust lately.

When the finish line feels farther away, it isn't because someone moved Golden Kubestronaut.

It's because the file keeps showing me which physics I'm actually practicing — and because I'm done treating the chase as a performance with a waiting audience.

I used to need validation from outside to believe the work counted.

I'm trying, imperfectly, to flip that.

Prove it to myself first.

Let the logos be residue, not the reason.

Atlanta gave me hunger.

The spreadsheet keeps it honest.

Still packing the truck

I want the gold. I'm not evolved enough to pretend otherwise.

I also want the quieter thing underneath it: to be bored in a terminal. To have the mechanics fall away so the problem is the problem again, not my own panic about flags and YAML skeleton muscle memory. That kind of boredom doesn't photograph well. It also doesn't require a witness.

Some mornings that want feels noble.

Some mornings it feels like I booked a very expensive personality test on a recurring calendar invite.

Either way I keep scheduling the next one.

Not because I'm sure the line is closer.

Because stopping would mean deciding the second building on campus is someone else's problem — and I already know I'd wander back into the parking lot in a week, muttering about domain weights.

Another KubeCon is coming up like a date circled in ink — different city, same unfinished sentence from Atlanta.

Between here and there: more coffee, more quiet houses, more tabs that aren't just another Tuesday.

The hallway still has my name on a few doors I haven't opened cleanly.

I'm still walking it — less for the nod I used to rehearse, more for the version of me who has to live with the file.

The trophy can wait in the lobby.

I'm busy with the middle.

// built from raw materials & a little AI · no templates were harmed