About Me

Let me start out by saying that DevOps, CI/CI Pipelines, and the like have always fascinated me. Having said that, I have been focused for the last eight years on Front-End technologies.

Recently, I had an opportunity to take some AWC Certified Developer Associate training at our office. I opted to jump into the course ... which had my coach jumping too, since I had never mentioned interest in cloud technologies.

Training

The training was covered by my employer on the assumption that I got my certification within (what I thought was) a reasonable deadline.

The course was average ... which led me to looking at other training, specifically:

• Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2021 - NEW! by Stephane Maarek.

I wasn't long into the online-course when I realized that the five-weeks I had to prepare (and finish a course that should have taken several months) was way too short.

I'm stubborn ... my wife and family will certainly attest to that.

I picked up practice tests:

• AWS Certified Developer Associate from WhizLabs
• AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exams 2021 from Tutorials Dojo

My plan be came study 8-hours each day (on top of work) and take at least one practice test each day as well. Once the training (160 pages of notes) was complete, I averaged three tests a day until it was time to take my test.

Working with AWS

While all of this was going on, my employer had what we call "EDJEovation Days." This is a four-day window where we can work on vetted side-projects as a team (this year's focus was on cloud technologies.

So in addition to all of the studying, I got to try to build a WebSocket service from several online examples ... all of these failed until I tried implementing the setup in CloudFormation.

Now

Now, I am an AWS Certified Developer Associate with some experience behind me and a whole lot to explore and learn moving forward.