11 AWS certifications. What does it mean to have 11 AWS certifications? In the basest interpretation, it means that I have passed (at least) 11 certification exams. Other than that, it means a lot of things, many of which I would have never expected. It means that: many people on LinkedIn now believe that I am their personal learning coach, there to provide them with personalized learning plans and advice; in a similar vein, I have also received quite a few questions/requests from people who now believe me to be their personal AWS Q&A service.

TL;DR This is not a brain dump or a “how-to-pass exam X” post. There are plenty of those elsewhere already. A little over a year ago (last August, to be exact), I unknowingly forked my career path. You may be asking how is that I came to cause such a major divergence while yet remaining unaware as to the fact that I had done so. The answer is both very simple and quite complicated: I got my first AWS certification.