Thursday 11 November 2010

Games of fate…

Funnily enough the last two days I heard stories of people commuting great distances each weekend to work in a totally different place or even country from the place where their family lives! The first was from my housemate who told me that one of her British colleagues is married to a Greek lady who lives with their children in Greece! He flies back and fourth every weekend. My manager was also telling me about a TV program he watched of British people moving to live permanently in India or Dubai!

commuting...

Are they all doing it on purpose? Just because I rejected the job in the country side, do I have to be constantly reminded about it? I made my choice and I’ll live with it…

Anyway, on a different subject in two days I’ll be taking my exams. The name of the certificate has recently changed and it is now called ‘Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 6/SE 5 Programmer’ (yes, all that) in comparison to ‘Sun Certified Java Programmer’ since Oracle now bought Sun. Everything else is the same. I don’t like the change since people might get confused and think it is related to Oracle and not Java and I’ll have to explain that it is the same as before.

If all goes well and I’ll pass the exam I’ll successfully finish an effort I started earlier this year that got more serious when I started the course in beginning of September! It’s not definite that I’ll be able to take full advantage of that certificate, since I lack the commercial experience of being a Java developer or the gravity of a graduate of a computer science degree, but at least I’ll have something extra to demonstrate in my CV.


For the moment I’m not that confident at passing the exams. Each question is about reading some else’s code and try to figure out the possible outcome or whether the compilation will fail or the JVM will throw a runtime error. It’s not that easy to read some else’s code especially the ones used for the exams since they are more dense and difficult to decode than normal. You might have a 15 rows code and you’ll think that the question is about something totally irrelevant when the error is caused by a single missing semicolon character.

It is all down to luck though. Of course I know some topics much better than others. That means that if I’m lucky enough and I have more questions on those, I will pass. Otherwise, I will simply have to pay the fees and take the exams in a month’s time.

So, wish me good luck.

9 comments:

  1. Practice makes perfect. Are there practice exams you can take? Have you already taken some?

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  2. Good luck! I know folk who commuted Isle of Wight to London each day!!!

    ahoj

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  3. @Vilges_Suola Σ'ευχαριστώ

    Cubby Yes, I found some mock exams I took and lots of questions from books and .pdfs. I tried to do many of them...

    @MadeInScotland. You're not helping. :-) I know some people (me) that walk to work and can come home to relax for their lunch break...

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  4. Well, at the rate that the JCP is imploding, the fact that it's "Oracle" Java vs Apache if / when they split may matter.

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  5. @MadeInScotland... Thanks

    @Gauss_Jordan I don't exactly understand what you mean but I'm not familiar with Apache to be honest. You have some inside information that I lack. :-)

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  6. @Gauss_Jordan. Thanks for that. I'll take a look at it. :-)

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