A while back I was fortunate enough to attend Laracon EU 2016 in the fantastic city of Amsterdam with a bunch of the team from work. There were a fantastic range of talks throughout the duration of the event. I learnt a lot and had a great time in the process.
One of the big announcements was from the big man himself, Taylor Otwell. The announcement was for a new formal process of assessing and accrediting developers and teams whom have demonstrated that they have the knowledge and ability to utilise the framework to craft web applications at the highest standard. This process is known as the Laravel Certification Program.
Two years later, and the program is about ready to kick off and is taking early-bird pre-orders.
Although I’m primarily a frontend developer, I’ve used Laravel for the past four years and somewhat align myself with the mythical “Full-stack developer”, so I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring to take the exam.
The exam covers a range of topics, including but not limited to HTTP, routing, blade templating, services, localization, security, collections, queues, database and Eloquent. I have a fairly solid understanding of most of these topics so I’m not too worried, and the website claims that “if your day job involves building Laravel applications, you’ll probably do fine” - so I’m staying confident.
That being said, I’m going to look some more into some of the topics I’m not too strong on such as queues and eloquent. To aid in my own understanding I’m taking on the challenge of helping with side projects belonging to members of my team outside of work to also help build their own understanding. I’ve said it before, but nothing reaffirms your own knowledge than trying to explain how and why to somebody else. So I’m hoping this will prove to be a good exercise.
Anybody else out there thinking of taking the certification exam? Are you confident? If not, how are you preparing?
