DEV Community: Roy Honders

Flash around your AWS badge of honor.

Roy Honders — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 13:53:15 +0000

This blog will go to detail into:

Why one should or shouldn't certify.
My experience with AWS.
Practical exam tips.
The result I achieved.

Why certify?

The title might sound like I am immediately going to advocate getting certified on AWS but the first question to ask is always why?
Why would someone need a certification/badge? How does a standardized test make you as a developer more knowledgeable?

The short answer is that you probably don't need to get certified in order to get the knowledge that you need to do your job right.

To me, the added benefit is that someone else (an employer or client) can quickly validate that you have a certain level of knowledge required to handle their systems in AWS. Other than that, it's a nice validation that you have the skills required to work with AWS.

My journey into AWS

The first time I did something with AWS was somewhere in 2018 when I was discovering how to host the side-project I was working on. At this time I didn't know anything about public cloud providers other than the ones that provide cheap virtual private servers (VPS's).
Compared to EC2 from AWS this is way cheaper, but AWS seemed more professional and able to provide other services as well.

For this project, I ended up not choosing AWS, because Google Cloud had an easier serverless compute option with their App Engine and Cloud Run services (topic for another blog post). This however didn't stop me from using AWS for other goals.

In February 2019 I started my graduate internship. At the internship company, they used AWS fully. Since they didn't need me to work on all the systems, I only used the S3 service to retrieve some exported data that I could use to do my project.
Although this experience didn't give me the full picture of AWS as a cloud provider, I could learn how to use the CLI and work with one of its services. Besides that, I heard from the backend team about the other AWS services and could write them down for further investigation into what they are.

This leads me to the first real experience with AWS. In October 2019 I started working at Luminis as my first full-time job. The project I started with required the use of AWS IoT. This is a specialized service for building internet of things services.
As a front-end engineer, I was tasked to build an Angular application directly on top of the HTTP API that Amazon Web Services provides. In order to do this, we needed temporary credentials, which let met to using Cognito.
To host the website we used CloudFront as a CDN and S3 as the storage. For another project, I have also learned how to configure a custom domain to CloudFront, but this wasn't yet needed for this project.

How much experience would you say you have before taking the exam?

Together I would say I had 3 months of experience using AWS actively and full-time before taking the exam. In this Added to that is 6 months of using mainly the S3 service.
Together you could call this 9 months of experience, but my projects didn't use AWS as intensively as is asked in the developer associate exam.
Before the exam, I only used a handful of services, while there are over 200+ of them. This means I had to learn the goal of the other services in order to prepare for the exam.

Practical exam tips after deciding to get certified

If you like to read more about AWS to get a broad overview first, I suggest you look at some of these cheat sheets to get some more information about all the services out there:
https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/

Just a few days before taking your exam you have to follow the following course: https://www.aws.training/Details/Curriculum?id=19185

This course will go into detail on how AWS will ask questions and it will give an interactive way of stressing the important details that exist in the question.
For example, you will notice that usually the first sentence of a question is not informative for answering the question.

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certification-prep/

1. Look at some of the product (services) FAQs

Studying for the exam, you mainly have to learn about AWS services. A good way to learn about them is by reading their FAQs. This will list all the common questions others have asked about the services.

This is not something I did for ALL of the services that AWS is offering. However, I found it really useful to get an idea of what these services are for. Examples I looked at are:

More advanced products:

Kinesis data firehose

2. Take practice exams.

The practice exam service that I used is called Whizlabs for which you can buy exams through a one-time purchase. You could also purchase an official AWS practice exam, but that one is more expensive.

After completing one exam successfully you will get a free official practice exam for your next certification and you will also get a 50% discount towards your next exam.

There are five practice exams that you can make:

This is what the results look like:

The added benefit of learning through the practice exams is as follows:

3. Saving links as resources that you didn't know about when making practice exams.

For me one of the links I saved was:

Parameter store

This is something I wanted to do more before taking the exam, but I didn't get around to it because I had already planned my exam in advance. Although it is very helpful to do in the beginning while studying.
I also made notes from the Udemy course that I took, so I only saved one link from my Whizlabs journey. For my next exam, I will save more links to resources based on Whizlabs and I will not be taking a Udemy course. This because a video-based course makes me learn slower than being confronted with exam questions and further references after making a mistake.

What you will get in return for your efforts

In the end, this is what you gave all that effort for:

On the 1000 point scale, I got an 880 grade. The minimum to pass the exam is 720.

For the cost of $150 (~€135) I wouldn't personally spend this amount of money on the exam, especially since there is a tax portion included which would be more beneficial to pay through your own company or an employer for write-off benefits.

Ending notes

At the company I am working for, we are continuously working to develop our cloud knowledge. This year we will be participating in "cloud the game", a game to learn cloud technologies made by colleagues to be used by other colleagues.
If this seems like something fun for you to partake in, you can always have a look at the careers page and be sure to mention my name once you decide to apply.

My professional goals for 2021 are to learn more about security in AWS. I will be doing this by getting the AWS Certified Security - Specialty certification.

Hidden feature on Dev.to that motivates people to stay active

Roy Honders — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 18:54:41 +0000

Emails from people following you

Ever since I joined I kept getting these emails that someone followed me, which I thought was pretty cool. It gives me a reason to stay on the platform in order to gain a small following.
It wasn't until I found out why exactly I got these emails that I thought it was awesome instead of just cool.

It is because when you visit dev.to the next people to sign on are encouraged to follow the latest active user on their website (in this case me).

Growth hacker marketing

This is one of the tactics that Twitter used to grow their audience, namely letting people follow someone as soon as they sign up to the platform (described in the book growth hacker marketing).
Dev.to probably uses this tactic to make sure new users have something to read and give smaller publishers, like me, the ability to grow.

What I have learned from the book "Javascript Grammar II" by @js_tut

Roy Honders — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 15:30:46 +0000

With this post you will able be to evaluate whether or not you should pickup or read the book yourself.
Since I already have some experience with Javascript, you can use my blog post to evaluate the amount of new information someone with experience with Javascript can acquire from this book.
If everything I'm saying is new to you, please read the book for yourself.
If you know half of these things you probably know enough already.

First of all I want to thank Greg Sidelnikov (@js_tut) for putting this amazing book out there, free of charge. You can find his tweet about it right here:

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1110856477697294337-52'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1110856477697294337&theme=dark" }

So what have I learned from his book?

First of all I have learned that Javascript has a new language version ECMAScript 2019 (ES10). This means that they have added some new features to the language.

Next to that I have learned that there is a copy function in the chrome devtools. This can copy objects to your clipboard which could be really useful for constructing automated tests.

Also learned that the JSON format expects double quotes and with single quotes it doesn't behave well (although from my experience it is possible to stringify objects with single quotes).

In Javascript each object has it's own name that identifies the object. This way two identical objects could be separated.

In order to delete a property on an object you can use the "delete" keyword.

Destructuring in ES6 is also possible for arrays, for example:

[a, b] = [1, 10]
// a = 1, b = 10

Declaring a variable using var attaches the variable to the window object. But using let doesn't do that.

Closures are functions inside other functions that will immediately be invoked inside the top level function. This way you can execute multiple functions at once.

Closures can also be used as function constructors.

You can get the amount of parameters in a function from the length property on the function object:

function x(param1, param2) {
}
console.log(x.length) // logs the value: 2

In a loop you can skip a step by using the continue keyword.

In Javascript statements, for example a for loop can be labeled in order to refer to them when using the break or continue keywords.

Array.some & Array.every are useful functions for evaluating the contents of an array.

Reducers (reduce functions) have to return a value of the same type as the input. For example if numbers are inputted, numbers have to be returned. Not let's say strings or booleans.

Iterators can be converted to an array using the spread operator.

Writing your own code for solving a problem is always a good idea, because then you will be thinking for yourself instead of relying on someone else's partial solution to your problem. Problem solving is your job.

Abstraction is your best friend.

Abstraction will help you a ton when programming in general, but it also applies to Javascript.

When you declare a function it will have a parameters property. When you declare an arrow function (() => {}) it won't have the parameters property.

Arrow functions inherit the lexical scope of the code when using the this keyword. This can be useful when you need to use an object reference instead of a reference to the window object.

In Javascript functions are the constructors of all object types. Even for functions themselves.

requestAnimationFrame() is useful to make animations appear smoother.

Last bits of the book

In the end, the book talks a lot about object oriented principles which I already know a ton about because of my education. That's why I completely skipped that part of the book, since I would have to filter out almost everything that I knew already. So I cannot judge that part of the book on it's contents, you would have to read it for yourself.

The book also seems to stress the importance about knowing the inner workings of Javascript and how topics like the event loop are often asked as interview questions. This is because the deeper understanding of a language will separate the beginners from the professionals and this knowledge will allow for more efficiënt programs and websites being built.

Conclusion

Although you might have learned something new from this list of new things that I have learned, you might not have learned everything that is available in the book. It may also be possible that after reading this, you are lacking the context that is given in the book about each statement that I talked about. Then it's a good idea to check out the book for yourself.

Note: this is my first post on this platform and I might have made a minor error in this post. I am open to feedback and am willing to correct potential mistakes in order to improve the quality of the post.

If you liked my content, be sure to follow me on Twitter!