The last set of certs I did was around 2010. They were the six certs required to be a Microsoft Certified Architect (?). I was transistioning from a decade of C bit twiddling with some VB6 on the side to becoming an “Enterprise Developer” and had just gotten a job where they were transitioning to from a VB/C++ backend to .Net.
My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.
Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.
The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.
When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.
Study for the developer cert and do some hands on work. Again, it’s not because I believe in the importance of “getting the certification”, it’s about the guided learning path.
I was able to get experience through my job, but if that isn’t an option for you, just build something. There are some really good, cheap, thorough Udemy course (no affiliation, not affilliate links):
This course goes over API Gateway, lambda, DynamoDB and a quick overview of how to create a NodeJS Serverless app:
That is the “right way” to create a Serverless API, but if you want to take a regular old Node/Express API and run through lambda you can use the lambda proxy integration:
My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.
Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.
The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.
When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.