AWS certified!
4 October 2020
I passed my AWS practitioner exam!!!
After an eternity of revising for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam (it’s been less than 2 months since finishing the Generation course), I finally had the exam remotely on Friday and am extremely pleased to say that I passed with flying colours! The pass mark was 70% and I managed to get 84%, which was an especially big relief as the series of mock exams which I had been using in the last few days to illuminate specific areas I needed to go over again were only comprised of high level questions - which meant I’d failed every test I’d attempted before going into the exam which isn’t the most comforting thing, even when you do feel like you know the content…
If anyone is looking to take this exam (or otherwise further their IT skills) I would definitely recommend checking out freeCodeCamp on YouTube as they have many useful videos and a 4 hour long video (many short videos stitched together) that goes over everything you need to know for the exam and has walkthroughs for a lot of it. If you are going to have a watch of that though, I would recommend giving yourself a decent number of days to spend on it (unless you really are super confident already) as it really is a brief overview and example of everything; even after a 3 month course AND a few weeks of my own revision, it still took almost a week for me to get through the full AWS CCP video with the amount of extra research I did to really understand each topic and check things I was unsure about that weren’t mentioned in the video.
Now I’m certified though, it’s time to delve deeper into python and programming in general as that’s what I really enjoy. I’ve been using CodeWars katas so far to generate programming challenges to push my skills and see how other (much more experienced) people have solved the same issues, but now I have 0 time-dependant obligations I’m thinking it’s time to start an actual project! No idea what yet, but I have a few sites noted down to have a read through and hopefully find some inspiration, it seems like the best advice is to do a project that solves an issue/makes an improvement to your life personally but honestly, hearing that when you have so little experience of what’s actually possible is sort of like saying “oh yeah, you’re familiar with the English language and know it has some weird words and weird rules that don’t make much sense, well why don’t you just pick one of them and fix it with a nice little solution that makes more sense?”. Like sure, I know the language and sure I’m familiar with loads of little problems with it, but fixing one of them? I wouldn’t even know where to start deciding which issue to tackle!
I’m sure that - like most things - it’s just getting the ball rolling in the first place that seems impossible and once it starts it will keep going with just the occasional push every now and then. I’ve also signed up for a few (varied and free) online talks which will hopefully give me some inspiration/real-life insight to inspire me and there’s a streamer called MasterMnd who does free coding bootcamps (American so streams in the middle of the night here, but everything gets uploaded to YouTube 24 hours later for anyone to watch) and has just started an 8 week, 16 session DevOps pipeline which seems really good too. I’ve only covered the first two sessions so far but I already feel like I’ve learnt a lot and he’s very open about his own history and experiences in the industry so maybe I’ll get some project inspiration from there, or at the very least a better insight into the world of tech along with the actual DevOps content he’s planning to teach.
Whatever happens next, all I know is that I’m excited for my future and all the possibilities it holds and hopefully, by the end of the year, I’ll have started my professional journey with a job in the industry!
Till next time,
¡JaBlog!