How I got 3 certifications in 3 months
Recently I started my journey on self-improvement and one of the areas I started to focus was on learning new technologies and this let me to the question: "When did I learn enough to say that I know something?".
This is not a simple question for the reason described on this famous image:
The most dangerous place to be is the "unknown unknowns", so instead of starting from scratch I decided to have a head start by using certifications as my initial study guide. Certifications are created by committees of highly specialised professionals and often have the involvement of the creators/developers of the technology, this prevents me from having gaps on my knowledge due to my single (and not as experienced) perspective.
The certifications I took were:
- CKAD: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (August 2023) - Notes
- Terraform Associate (003) (September 2023) - Notes
- JSNAD: OpenJS Node.js Application Developer (October 2023) - Notes
They need quite some time to prepare and because of that I had to create a system that would allow me to do it more efficiently and that's what I want to share on this post.
1 - Consistency
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems - James Clear
Conventional knowledge says that if a person is motivated it can achieve everything, but motivation is highly overrated. How many people are super excited to hit the gym and after a couple of weeks give up? Motivation can only last so long and you should only rely on it to be your jumpstart. The answer to continue working towards a goal is discipline.
The book Atomic Habits has a really nice explanation on how to create habits that will help you to keep consistency and therefore achieve your goals. Atomic habits is a really good book and it I can't recommend enough, but I will try summarise strategy:
- Remove obstacles - Removing obstacles makes it easy to start your habit. If you need to read a book, put it close to you, if you need to code, keep the project open on vscode and so on.
- Keep it small - You can't optimise what you don't have. Instead of trying to create a habit of studying for 2 hours, start with 1 class of ten minutes and over time start to increase it little by little.
- Reserve a place and time to do it - It compounds with remove obstacles. Once you have a place and time to go it becomes an appointment which will help to keep you committed.
- Create a habit chain - Use your other habits as a started point, for example, if you drink coffee everyday, during it you can read some pages of a book, or if you don't wanna mix things you can do it after it.
2 - Organization
If you just study things aimlessly you won't progress that much, having a Study Guide listing the topics you want to know more help you to keep focus and be more efficient. This is where the certifications can be a nice initial resource and over time you can expand it with other things.
3 - Learning Techniques
There are many learning techniques, but the ones that I think are the most important are:
- Deliberate practice - Reading and taking courses are too passive, the content you learn will leave your mind easily, so a good way to retain is to practice it (writing code, answering questions and so on) after studying and from time to time test yourself again.
- Retrieval - Get a empty piece of paper and try to rewrite de content as much as you can, after it, compare with the original resource and check what you need to improve.
- Teaching - If you can't explain you probably don't you about the topic as much as you think. Explaining content to others help you to really digest the content you learned (that's the reason I started this digital garden and do presentations)
4 - Going Deeper
Often we accept things as they are presented and don't investigate how things work and whenever something doesn't work as expected we don't know what to do because things seem to be magic.
Certifications in the end won't cover all the topics that exist about an specific technology, so once you learned enough using it, dig deeper. Whenever you see mentions to a topic that is not explained/covered, write it down and research later, read the documentation and use forums to get more information about it, this will remove the feeling of "this is magic" that we sometimes feel.