Tag: Self Improvement

My AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Study Path

I’ve been talking for years about getting the Solution Architect credential, but I’ve never put aside the amount of time needed. This latter half of this year I’ve decided to take 20% of the time I usually spend on clients and spend it on myself instead, and the first goal was to take the AZ-305 exam.

Note: I cannot say anything about the exam itself, as you’re made to sign an NDA not to, but I can tell you about my study path and how I first failed, and then succeeded.

First Try

I failed my first try at this exam, and from what I’ve gathered, it’s not uncommon. I spent about 36 hours of study time in the first round, and I focused on the study path that Microsoft supply on their certificate page.

This study path does not represent the knowledge you’re being tested on. I failed because I studied the wrong things. I got 634 points out of 1000 where 700 is the passing limit.

After failing I did a short retrospective with myself on what went wrong, found new resources to study and set at it again for another 3 weeks of intensive studying. I can be quite stubborn when my mind is set on something.

Second Try

I spent about 40 hours on my second round of studies. First of all I bought the MeasureUp AZ-305 Practice Test and I did all of the 168 questions in 4 sittings. The way I did it was that for every question, I pasted it into Chat GPT and then we discussed every possible answer, why it was right or wrong. This way I used the test to find my knowledge gaps. It was also a great way to discover and remember the things I got wrong, instead of just skipping to the next question. It helped me to get a better understanding about topics I’m not familiar with.

The practice questions can be questionable, but the act of going through and discussing them was most useful to me.

This was a great use case for AI, even if Chat GPT wasn’t always right, it helped me remember as I had to reason about the knowledge. I find that much better than just reading.

I should say, the MeasureUp test has questions that are close to the real exam, but some of the questions are infuriating, and I did find some that were plain wrong. While this sounds bad, getting angry is also a good way of remembering what you try to study.

After identifying my knowledge gaps I did a couple of labs in Azure. I setup scenarios in my own Azure tenant, created resources and tried different things. This was very useful for resources and features that I don’t use myself in my day-to-day work.

  • Availability sets, creating virtual machines in sets, setting up Azure Load Balancer and testing fail-over
  • Availability zones, creating virtual machines in different zones
  • Virtual machine scale sets, setting up an autoscaling cluster of machines
  • Azure Site Recovery, setting up replication of a machine in a different region
  • Azure Backup, playing around with the different backup options
  • Azure SQL where I setup different configurations of single Azure SQL, DTU tier, vCore Tier, Elastic Pool and Managed Instance
  • Azure Policy and Initiatives, creating policies and applying them to my subscriptions

I wanted to play around more with Microsoft Entra ID, but most of the things I wanted to lab with requires a P2 license, like conditional access, access reviews, PIM and ID Protection.

Another thing I did was I watched John Savill’s study cram on YouTube. While it’s very high level and not detailed enough to pass the exam, I found that sometimes he was saying things I didn’t know about, so I went ahead and looked it up to learn about it. I watched this during my commute over a span of 3 weeks.

John Savill is the GOAT for making these study cram videos. I think it was good repetition of the basics before the exam.

The last thing I did was that I got the AZ-305 Exam ref from Amazon. First I thought it was a waste of money, because it would be delivered before the day of my exam, but it arrived early and I spent a couple of evenings reading it through.

While it doesn’t contain all the details you need to know, it’s still a very good and dense walkthrough of everything on a high level, and sometimes very detailed as well. I can recommend getting it if you’re struggling with the exam.

The exam ref has all the bullet points of what you need to know. Maybe not all the details, but it’ it’s a good starting point.

With all this studying I was much more confident on my second try and I finished with 844 points out of 1000 where 700 is the passing score.

Summary

I think this certificate was quite hard, the hardest yet. The reason for me saying so, is that in my previous certificates Administrator and Developer I’ve felt quite at home by using the technology in my daily job. In this certificate they test that you know much about all of Azure, not only the parts that you are comfortable with.

It took me about 80 hours of effective study time to learn everything I needed and I don’t think it’s something that anyone would pass without study. Everyone has their part of Azure they’re comfortable with, and this tests on the whole platform.

Now I have the Administrator, the Developer and the Solution Architect certifications. The only one left that I’m interested in is the DevOps certificate so I guess I’ll do that next.

Refactor Your Wetware

I’m running a book club with a group of people, where we read one book every sixth months. The group is a bunch of people all working with software some way or the other. The books that we’ve read have been very management oriented but this time around we got around reading on the topic of self improvement.

Book cover page, Pragmatic Thinking & Learning - Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt

This book wants you to become aware of how you think, what you think and why you think the way that you do. It also provides a couple of tools to help you think deliberately.

Andy describes a model of thinking where he split the brain into the L-mode and the R-mode, with a shared bus in between. The L-mode is the active thinking you do when you concentrate and R-mode is the background thinking you do when you shut down L-mode. The shared bus means that you can only use L-mode or R-mode, but never both at the same time. Some problems, like pattern matching is easier to do with the R-mode, but in order to engage that line of thinking you need to stop focusing. This is why you solve problems while walking the dog, taking a shower or sleeping. You turn L-mode off and let R-mode do the pattern matching needed to solve a particular problem.

It is just a model and I wouldn’t say that anyone knows if this is the way our brain works, but it does map into my own experience with taking a walk over lunch time to find new perspectives on what I’ve been working on up to that point.

The book continues to build on this model and introduce you to biases and bugs in your brain. It provides tools to be able to alter your thinking and find new ways to think and to learn.

I thought this was a useful book and I would recommend it to you if you’re interested in thinking about thinking.