Certifiable

Because I did not go to Bali or Vietnam or Queensland like a smart person with two weeks off in August, I felt the need to create a holidays to-do list so that I could be productive with my fortnight off, as well as relaxed.

As it turned out, the weather for most of the last two weeks has been close to immaculate for early-late winter and I even slept without socks on for half a night. Every time I've looked out the window and seen sunshine, I've had the luxury of saying "whelp" and then going for a walk in the sunshine. While everyone else is working. Pretty cool.

Back when I had a job, around Easter, I sat through eight days of Azure training. I've used Azure services a lot, but have never had the need to create virtual networks, set up VMs, or even deploy App Services. Let alone monitor, govern and maintain them. It was cool to get a rundown of all the infrastructure and platform as a service offerings and how they worked together. I did not do the exam, because at about the same time I was working a lot and it was easy to attend the training online while I was working, but not so easy to study for the exam and take it while balancing clients and projects.

The context was different when I was making my holiday to-do list, I had plenty of time, and it only took me a couple of seconds to write "do Azure certification exam" on the list under "plant chilis" and "buy dehydrator".

I booked the exam for today - my last day of leave - figuring I could enjoy most of my holidays with Vanessa, keep my mind clear for pub trivia on Wednesday night, then dedicate Thursday to some revision and practice tests before taking the exam on Friday morning.

Well, this plan was going well through the parts where I was out hiking and coming second in pub trivia. When I began my revision in earnest it was clearer to me that this was an exam that might not be possible to pass with only a day of study, and that the recommendation was to take it after "6 to 12 months of hands-on experience".

My dilemma was that I had already begun to study, and to cancel my exam attendance would mean that I would have wasted precious holiday time. The mitigation to this risk would be to dedicate even more time and energy to studying, but that then increased the risk that a failure would have been an even bigger waste of my break. I consumed a lot of content and videos about the exam itself as well as the documentation about the products, and I decided that I would not waste my holidays, no, I was going to play a fun game with my brain called "see how much Azure information you can cram into your memory over a day, and thus prove how smart/idiotic you really are".

I would at least get a journal entry out of it.

A recent science article described how human beings have dramatic "ageing" windows in their early forties, which scared me, but also motivated me a little too.

Luckily, on Thursday it was raining.

So I watched a lot of videos and did a lot of practice questions and read a lot of reference material and after doing all of that up until the minutes before my exam this morning, I did not feel confident at all that I was going to pass the exam. I was already mentally drafting this entry and my feelings about failing.

Then, after some technical difficulties and delays that made me glad I'd brought a backup, certain, blue drink bottle for my desk, I was finally into the exam and man the questions were a lot harder than the practice questions.

It took me about a third of my allocated time to realise that the exam format included a link to the Azure documentation. This was helpful, but also meant the questions were also harder because there was an expectation that you would look up the relevant technical information assuming you knew what and where to review.

Because I did my exam prep with YouTube videos from random internet people, instead of I guess reading the exam details themselves more closely, I was now way behind schedule.

With twenty minutes left I still had fifteen questions remaining, nearly a third of the exam. Most questions had multiple parts, and I have one particularly grand memory of trying to trace in my head the network traffic from one subnet to another subnet to a DNS server to an A Record, repeated for multiple VMs in different networks, while watching the clock trickle down. In the end I had to go by instinct for a lot of questions. I finished my first pass of the questions with thirty seconds to spare, and I did not make any changes in the review that followed.

If my expectations were low going into the exam, they were even lower after clicking "OK" and letting it calculate my final score. The online proctor surely would have chuckled at my reaction to the pass score I was presented with. And a little firework animation. Nice. The final report included my identification photo that I had to take twice after the first round of technical difficulties, and how I looked in that snapshot was the opposite of how I looked on the other side.

So, I didn't waste any of my holidays and I won the game of "see how much Azure information you can cram into your memory over a day, and thus prove how smart/idiotic you really are". I don't know how I did it, other than I am an incredibly logical person with a good recall of minor details, 77.9% of the time... If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that I am both smart and quite dumb, and also how to configure virtual load balancers across cloud and on premise networks.