My journey to pass the AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure

Preparing for a certification exam while working could always be challenging for most people, and that's why I decided to use the famous "bridge" (AKA faire le pont ) during the French national holidays to achieve it recently.

In this post, I'll skip all kinds of blah blah, such as the description of the exam, the motivation talk, the importance of being certified, or any other similar content that you may find on the internet. Let's jump directly into the real stuff.

As for me, I made myself a three-day plan to pass the AZ-204:

DAY 1

Go through the basics. I went through all the e-books and other kinds of reading materials, instead of wasting time on things that I've known well or already used at work, I just focused on the topics that I was not familiar with yet.

Completing the lab exercises on Github may be helpful for certain people as well: https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-204-DevelopingSolutionsforMicrosoftAzure/, however, I didn't spend too much time on passing all the modules but rather focused on the modules that I haven't done before.

DAY 2

Practice makes perfect. MeasureUp is a true friend here as they've released the online practice test for AZ-204. It was quite challenging for me to complete all the 154 questions in 1 day, especially that I needed to take notes on the wrong answers and find out the reason, but in my opinion, intense practice is helpful in terms of remembering mass information in short-term memory, as for me, it stimulated my brain to adapt to a higher work rate hence I was able to learn a lot faster than usual within a short time.

What about the exam dumps? Well, I would say that it might be helpful during the preparation, but only for the usage of finding out the blind spots. Do not trust 100% the answers to the questions online, sometimes it could be wrong and you need to judge by your own experience or piece of testing code.

DAY 3

Check notes and clear the head. No more need to go over and over the things that I know well, but only the mistakes that I've made and why.

I spent the day going over the notes that I've taken before and made sure that I completely understand the items one by one. I think this helps massively to improve the overall knowledge level of Azure for me.

And yes, at the end of the day, certification in the pocket:

I'd also like to share my general feedback on the exam itself:

• The overall difficulty is not that high as long as you're well prepared
• Docker, ACI, Storage account v2, event/message based solutions play a big part in the exam
• The questions are pretty aligned with the official exam skills outline, so gain some hands-on experience if it's possible and trust me it's gonna really help

Last but not least, being certified for me is not the end of the learning but just a beginning, it proves one knows what to do and how to do in theory. Going further, only the concrete solution and implementation could show the value and the beauty that cloud computing can bring to us.

Since the certification expires in 2 years, a learning mindset would be something that we need to look for instead of the certification itself. Shout out to all the devs and please leave a comment if you have any questions 💪