AWS Certified Developer – Associate

5+ Years of AWS, 2 Weeks of Study

I've been working with AWS since 2016, starting at Alphacode where I used SNS for push notifications, through madeby.id where I managed RDS (MySQL), S3 with CloudFront, ECR-to-EC2 deployments, SNS/SQS/SES for async messaging, and ElastiCache (Redis) for API caching. At Code Green Creative, Leadbook, Digital Butter, and now Villa Finder, AWS has always been used.

So when I decided to get certified, I already knew most of AWS services from daily work.

Why DVA?

DVA validates exactly what I do every day: developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-native applications within AWS. I wanted a formal stamp on my experience. With 5+ years of hands-on AWS, I was confident that DVA would be a good fit to showcase my expertise and commitment to cloud development.

The 2-Week Strategy

Actually no strategy, I just like to live dangerously (please note that I do not apply this mental model to production environments). Because I was proud of my experience and wanted to challenge myself.

Week 1 — Stephane Maarek's Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate course.
Watched at 2x speed for every video.

Week 2 — Jon Bonso's 6 practice tests on Udemy.
Get good with the practice tests. Reviewed all answers whether its correct or incorrect and read the explanation carefully.

Week 3 - You only live once!
I passed DVA! - Proof

Tips

Tips? Meet me IRL or chat to me 😆

My next plan

Never let your friends know your next plan (learnt from Tekken)