I sat the AWS Developer Associate exam on June 5th, and found out yesterday I’d passed with an 822! This exam was both easier and more difficult than the Solutions Architect Associates for me, for a couple reasons. First and foremost, I have a lot more hands on experience with AWS services. I know intimately how ECS works, how IAM and resource policies interact, and what needs to be done to configure API Gateway, etc, so I didn’t need to study many of those services much. What was difficult were a lot of the specifics around specific APIs and headers – outside of Lambda, I’m not really using the SDK, nor am I crafting specific API requests for anything. There ended up being a lot of memorization of those aspects, just because they aren’t part of my AWS experience. For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Adrian Cantril’s courses, TutorialsDojo’s practice exams, and Cram.com for digital flash cards (their cram mode is super effective).
I looked back at my post about starting the process, and was rather shocked at how long ago I started studying for DVA-C02. It didn’t take me very long to get through the video course, those are fairly fun and interesting. I often was viewing them out of order, too, because a number of times they covered a service I actively needed to start using. I dragged my feet on the exam prep, though. I find it somewhat tedious. My usual process is to take a practice exam, review the questions and answers, create flash cards for the details I didn’t know and review those flashcards – then rinse and repeat. I also will try to identify any large gaps in my knowledge and do a deep review. It’s an effective process, and I can measurably see how I improve using this process. After a hard day of work, though, it’s not the thing I was most enthusiastic to do. Still, I wanted to get this done, so I set my exam date about six weeks ago, and got down to it. Y’know what? Still tedious, but not that bad, really.
So, what now? I’m going to keep working on further certifications. I don’t know if I absolutely need them, but studying for DVA-C02 gave me a lot of knowledge that I was able to immediately apply to my work. I also learned a lot more about how to use services like X-Ray that I was already using, but not nearly as effectively as I could. Sure, I could learn these things on my own, and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so. But the structured nature of the certification exams force me to learn about services I might not need to know right now, and forces me to learn more details than I’d probably learn on my own. I find the process worthwhile, even without the certification itself.
I’ve already started studying for the SysOps Associate exam. Given how much overlap there is with the SAA and DVA exams, as well as my own long history of system administration, I think this will probably be the least difficult preparation I’ve gone through. After that, I plan on working on the Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Professional, and Security specialization, although I haven’t decided the exact order yet. After that, we’ll see. I’ve been playing around with The Odin Project to better understand the developer’s tools, and it’d be fun to have full-stack skills. I might pursue one or more of the Kubernetes certs, to push me to dive deeper into that tech. I might start working on learning Terraform, because it would be useful to know that framework for IaC. A lot depends on what I feel like I most need to know right now, what I’m finding interesting, and what I think will be most helpful for the future. It’s also possible I might even take a break! We’ll see what the future holds
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