AWS Certified Developer

I got another AWS Certification. A couple years ago I got the AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) certification. See blog post here: http://josephmak2007.blogspot.com/2019/03/i-am-now-aws-certified-solutions.html. Well I went for not the next level (the Solution Architect professional) but for another associate level because I think it should be easier exam... as I already should know a thing or two. I was wrong, this test still require many hours of studying. I am into this because my company wants more people have a certificate like that.

Well, turn out to be this is also a not-so-easy exam... it isn't really testing your programming ability... but another here-remember-our-big-aws-product-catalog exam. Mostly which feature or option do you use if you encounter a certain problem...like do. you use Immutable deploymenet or Rolling with Additional Batch deployment if you want to be quick? Or do you use environment variables or stage variables if you use Lambda or API Gateway, etc.

There are many study tools on the web... I again went for the outdated hefty official AWS book as a starter and regretted becuase the book is big andr bulky and not concise enough. I found this place https://digitalcloud.training/ rather useful. Bought its 300+ page book packed with notes to study from... and again UDemy question packs were helpful.

Passing it does not mean you know everything really well you don't have to use any of the AWS services to pass the test... For example you don't ever have to put a file on S3 to know a few things about it such as you can host a website with it. AWS is huge. Each of my exams focus on a small subset of things.

But let me tell you this: it may not help your career at all. Nobody seem to care at all if you are AWS certified. There are actually very few openings out there. If you see 10 job openings 8 of them may actually point to the same place. Headhunters just want to be be the middleman to collect some $. And if you actually land on a job interview expect to get incredible difficult programmming quiz with interviewers whose sole goal is to humiliate you. And even if you ace your quiz you still may not get further without an explaination. Good luck to you if your are job searching.