Passing Laravel Certification
This has been on my mind for a long time but never had the time to really put it in action, while I am doing the planning for Q4 2021, I decided to add it to my goals. On the 27th of September, I officially obtained the Laravel certification. I will document here the steps that I took, in addition to some information and insights about the exam
How to apply?
First, you need to purchase a voucher from https://certification.laravel.com/ at the date of writing the post is €249.00. Laravel certification offers a discount program depending on where are you located. Since I am based in Brazil, I paid only €249 €149. After you purchase your voucher, your next step is to redeem it via a link they send to your email inbox, once you redeem it, you will receive an invitation link to take the exam which is valid for 3 months.
The exam can be taken anytime, even late at night, but once the exam has begun it must be completed.
How is the exam look like?
You will need to take the exam only in Google Chrome and install a ProctorExam chrome extension which will be recording your screen and your cam during the exam.
Pay attention to the following:
- You’re not allowed to consult books or documents.
- You shouldn’t use any app or code editor.
- The exam duration is 50 minutes for 45 questions.
- All questions are to pick the right answer. Mostly 4 options are available.
- You will lose a score for each wrong question, if you don’t know the answer, leave it empty.
- You can skip questions, and when you’re done, you can easily review the skipped questions and come back to answer them.
- You can’t really cheat, so plan to do it on your own.
- Pay attention to the Laravel version for the exam. For me, it was Laravel 6.
What kind of questions?
I think the questions mostly can be divided into 2 categories:
- Theoretical: This is to test your knowledge with the framework, usually the answers can be found in the documentation.
- Logical: These require some thinking, usually some code, you need to execute mentally and predict the output of the code or if it has an error and what type of error. I think these kinds of questions require experience building real-life projects.
Topics
You can find the list of the topics here from my experience I remember for sure had many questions about:
- Middlewares
- Eloquent ORM especially relationships
- Collections
- Events
- Routing
- Blade Templates
Note: this is not an exclusive list, but I think +50% of the questions are from the list above.
My experience
Having a Deadline
For me preparing for the exam without a deadline can result in weeks of preparation given the fact I always have projects to finish and I am a perfectionist, so I will always find new details that I don’t know and make it a reason to postpone the exam. Since I am aware of all of that and I am a person who works well under pressure, I created an artificial deadline which 2 days after I purchased the voucher. I told my wife that I have an exam that can’t be postponed or changed, and I mentally believed that. My approach was to go over the documentation once, read everything. Most of the topics I had in-hand experience, but I was surprised with some useful features I didn’t know about.
The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.
Nolan Bushnell
It’s about the journey, isn’t it?
In my opinion, the certificate itself is not important as the process of preparing for passing the exam. The fact was motivated to go over the Laravel documentation and read every single line under the pressure to pass the exam, definitely makes the Laravel certification worth it.
