Derrick

Derrick's story

Derrick grew up in Virginia Beach and started his tech career in the U.S. Army as an IT specialist - imaging machines, running cables, fixing printers. After leaving the Army around 2018, he moved through contractor roles and eventually landed a security analyst position in San Antonio.

The work was solid experience: monitoring security alerts, triaging incidents, documenting threats. But the schedule was brutal… 12-hour shifts, rotating days and nights, staring at dashboards waiting for something to break.

The worst part? When everything was quiet. When his status update was “everything’s fine,” it meant nothing was moving - not the systems, not his career. He was gaining experience, but he was also burning out. He knew he didn’t want to spend the next decade on that schedule, watching alerts scroll by.

From Instagram to first project

One day, scrolling Instagram during a break, Derrick came across a video from Maximus at NextWork. It wasn’t another “watch me build this” tutorial - it was a call to action: comment for instructions, here’s a platform that gives you projects to actually do.

He commented, got a response, and instead of saving it for later, he opened the platform and picked his first project.

That decision - to start instead of bookmark - changed everything.

From theory to practice

Derrick chose to start with a series of cloud networking projects on NextWork, because it overlapped with a university class he was taking and his day-job security work. The projects walked him through building real environments - subnets, routing tables, VPCs, CDNs - with step-by-step videos for when he got stuck.

This turned abstract concepts from textbooks into things he could configure, break, and fix himself. IP addressing wasn’t theory anymore, it was something he debugged at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

He completed about 20 projects, emailed the NextWork team for a personalized roadmap, and worked through it methodically. Along the way, he passed his AWS certification and started prepping for CCSP, using his project work as living proof of what the services actually did.

Somewhere in that process, the identity shift happened. He stopped seeing himself as “just a security analyst” and started seeing himself as a cloud engineer.

The Muay Thai mindset

When Derrick started applying for a cloud engineering role, he had a portfolio of projects and hands-on experience to point to. But he also had gaps. Terraform was a requirement for the job, and he was still learning it.

In the interview, he didn’t try to hide it. He told them he was still learning Terraform and laid out his plan to get up to speed using NextWork projects.

Derrick credits Muay Thai for that honesty. In the ring, you can’t hide what you’re bad at - it shows up. Same in a room with people who know the domain:

“Either you present your weaknesses or they’ll get exposed anyway.”

So he led with his. That honesty, combined with the hands-on work he could point to, helped him land the job.

Today

Derrick went from 12-hour security shifts to a 9-to-5 cloud engineering role. Same person, with a completely different day-to-day life at work.

“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!”

He’s still learning, still building projects, and still applying the same mindset. Lead with what you don’t know, build in public, and don’t wait for permission to start.