After a solid break from both the blogging and certifications, I decided to get back into the game and attempted the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification. It was sort of inevitable for a person in my situation. The products I am helping to create and manage run in AWS, and given the company’s commitment to embrace the cloud it only made sense to become familiar with the fundamentals of this platform. Amazon describes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Corporate PR aside, AWS is really cool piece of technology allowing you to do pretty much anything. Having day-to-day practical experience with this platform and desire to learn more led me to explore more and more till I took and passed the exam. Here are some notes I would like to share regarding this experience. Continue reading “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate”
Tag: certification
Oracle Certified Associate and Professional, Java SE 7 Programmer
This certification was one of the first exams I was considering after I was done with my college courses regarding Java and object-oriented programming. This was a time when I started working in programming and sort of needed to improve my rather basic knowledge in this area. However, it took me almost two years to make a decision to go for it (meaning the change to Java SE 7 and also revamp of the certification path by Oracle). This had both positive and negative effects. Upsides include more recent language knowledge being tested as well as a great way to prepare for both the certification and my thesis. On the other hand, the older SCJP exam for Java 6 was split into two exams increasing the overall price and also covered far more ground because of the additions in Java 7 release.
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Beauty and strangeness of generics
Recently, I was preparing for my Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 7 Programmer exam and I happened to encounter some rather strange-looking constructions in the realm of generics in Java. Nevertheless, I have also seen some clever and elegant pieces of code. I found these examples worth sharing not only because they can make your design choices easier and resulting code more robust and reusable, but also because some of them are quite tricky when you are not used to generics. I decided to break this post into four chapters that pretty much map my experience with generics during my studies and work experience.
Spring Professional Study Notes
Before we get down to my own additions to existing resources mentioned in my certification guide post I would like to reiterate all resources that I used for my preparation:
- Course-ware
- Spring in Action, Third Edition by Craig Walls
- Jeanne’s study notes
- Spring Framework Reference Documentation
SpringSource Certified Spring Professional
When I first heard about this certification I was really excited and wanted to find out what I can about this exam before I start any initiative to pass it. What I found however was the complete lack of resources, guides, information or mock exams of any kind. The only reasonable resource online I was able to find before my exam was a blog post about certification experiences by Jeanne Boyarsky on her well-known blog. However these information are almost 3 years old and few things have changed since then, so please allow me to update you on the current state of the certification process.
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