What I learned from building a PWA mobile app using AWS server-less tech over the weekends

7th of April 2022

Published an article on PWA app built with react/typescript and serverless tech on LinkedIn

How I passed the AWS developer exam

18th of March 2022

Two years ago, I managed to earn an AWS solution architect associate certificate after spending about a month or so doing deep dive and preparing for the exam.

This year I decided to give the AWS developer certification a crack because I always wanted to get deeper into the development side of AWS. I figure that by forcing myself to get the certification, I will have to force myself to master the subject since I don't really go deep enough with AWS in my current work

My journey leading to passing the exam started roughly about three weeks ago and below is a summary of what I have done to prepare to pass the exam.

1. ACloudGuru: Slogging through the AWS Developer Course in ACloudGuru. Since I have done the AWS solution architect course two years ago, I skipped some sections (S3, SQS, EC2 and few others) since it is redundant. The topics that I focused on were mostly serverless, lambda functions, API Gateway, security, IAM role and Developer Theory.
2. Doing trial exams: I signed up with tutorialsdojo (https://tutorialsdojo.com/) and paid for the AWS Developer Practice Exams. I tested my knowledge by going through the exams (there are 5 set of exams). To be honest, I failed about 4 times (that was actually a good thing) and focused on closing the gap by reading the detailed answers and checking AWS white papers and FAQS. Eventually I am able to hit 80% on new exam questions and getting almost 100% right when revisiting exams that I previously failed.
3. Creating a cheat sheet: Two days before the exam, I was starting to worry about losing my memory on some skills that I learned over the last two weeks. To mitigate this, I sat down and created a cheat-sheet from the top of my head. There were some facts that I have almost forgotten and this cheat-sheet gave me the opportunity to recall the memory through spaced repetition.
4. Exam day: During the day of exam, I looked at my cheat sheet in the morning an hour before the exam to 'refresh' my memory. The exam took me about 1 hours and 50 minute. Initially I had a bad feeling about the exam midway because there were a few questions that were sketchy, I marked those questions for review and soldiered on through the exam. After finishing the 65th question, my confidence started to increase as I revisit the questions that I wasn't 100% sure that I got right. I counted the questions where my confidence interval were lower than 75% and it was about 7, so mathematically speaking my odds of passing was high since it takes about 16 wrong questions (out of 65) to fail the exam. I hit the submit button and I was greeted with the PASS status after answering some irritating questions about the test experience. I was experiencing some of the highest high in years.. almost like winning a lottery except that I never won the lottery.

Key takeaways:

1. The AWS Developer exam was harder than AWS solution architect. Recommended getting the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification first before trying this one
2. Treat preparing for the exam like playing video games (Elden Ring is a good example). Keep failing your mock/trial exams until you succeed.
3. Learning AWS solution architecture and the developer course have expanded my understanding of how far we have progressed compared to the good old days of CISCO, VMWare and JBOSS. The fact that we could deploy software today that scales to a million of users in seconds by pressing a button without needing to buy or rent a fleet of expensive servers in physical data centers was a pipe dream 10 years ago. The tech industry is moving too fast and if we don't learn how to leverage cloud native tech today, we might as well just call it a day and retire.

That's it, I hope you may find this article useful. If you are interested in preparing for the AWS Developer Exam, feel free to use the cheatsheet that I have provided as a reference.