AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

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”

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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