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.

This one’s short, sweet, and to the point. Here are my GCP Professional Data Engineer exam notes. Good luck!

My goal for Q1 2019 is to add the Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification to my resume. In regards to writing about previous certification experiences, I have either: written a general outline of the experience much later not written about it at all, or just posted my study notes After more or less every certification, people have asked me what I did to prepare for the certification. Generally, the answer has been some combination of “practical experience and watching the A Cloud Guru course.

I was able to squeeze in the beta AWS ML exam the week before Christmas. Given that it was several weeks ago, some of the other resources on Medium may be more informative, but I’ll throw my two cents out here for anyone who may be interested. Generally speaking, know about different types of machine learning models (particularly those supported by SageMaker) and in what sorts of situations they’re applicable. These include:

“Why am I so nervous? I haven’t felt like this since… I took the first one.” After five AWS exams (particularly the two pro exams) and a handful of other certification exams, I didn’t really expect to be nervous taking this exam. Oddly enough, this is exactly how I felt going in, during, and in that inexorable “moment” of time between clicking the Submit Exam button and actually seeing the result on the page.

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.