My journey to achieve The Linux Foundation SkillCreds git certification (SC102)

Introduction:

Like many others, I succumbed to the allure of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, indulging in home equipment, gadgets, and yearly subscriptions. Perhaps, like many others, I shouldn’t have. :-)

Among different deals I found the bundles from Linux Foundation as an interesting offer and interesting opportunity. My CKA has expired, and want to renew it and CKS always sounds like a really good and challenging one. So, I embarked on a bit of shopping and, among other more advanced certification exams, discovered SkillCreds. These foundational level exams cover topics like git, vim, and yaml — the essential toolset for a modern DevOps, System, or Cloud engineer. They’re swift, have no expiration date, and are “AI proctored,” whatever that means. Who knows, perhaps I’ve been using git for over 10 years, but there’s a chance I’ve been doing it wrong. So, I decided to give it a shot. There is not much information about this particular cert, thats why here is the article about my personal experience with it.

My Goal:

I didn’t expect that the foundational level exam and cert will significantly improve my CV, making me ore appealing to recruiters. My motivation was guided by curiosity and a collector’s syndrome, that inner voice whispering, “One more badge, a blue one, my preciiiious.”

And, of course, the idea was to finally uncover full and accurate answers to those tricky questions we’re all familiar with. Questions like “What is the difference between ‘git reset — hard’ and ‘git checkout’” or “How does ‘git checkout -b’ differ from ‘git branch’?” Hardly believe this is useful knowledge in everyday work, but it’s always better to know then to not know.

Scheduling:

The sortest section in this article. No scheduling is required. “AI proctored” means that upon logging into the LF portal, opening the exam page, and undergoing legal name validation and system checks, you can commence the exam. Proctoring and anti-cheating validation are conducted by an AI system. Hopefully, one day, every exam will follow this model.

Preparation:

I spent about four evenings and approximately 4 hours on the weekend preparing. The abundance of git-related materials is astonishing. You can find courses, documentation, books, and labs — both free and paid — literally everywhere. YouTube, Udemy, other study platforms, commercial git platforms like Bitbucket and GitLab, cloud provider’s documentation, GitHub’s own documentation, and numerous git repositories by different users offer tons of information. There’s a lot to choose from, allowing you to select what suits you best. Below, I’ll share a list of resources I found helpful and impressive.

Free resources:

1. The Book. The Great and Terrible Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

It’s free, translated into many languages (in case you need it), and really cool. In my humble opinion, you only need this book and some practice to pass the exam and to know everything you’ll ever need about Git. The early chapters are quite simple; however, the material in later chapters could cover ‘one-time-per-the-whole-career’ cases and might be a bit more complicated. Still, it’s well-written and well-explained, highly recommend.

2. The exercises. https://gitexercises.fracz.com/. I found this one interesting, well-prepared, and entertaining. From my perspective, the exercises here cover more corner cases and are a bit more complicated than the tasks in the exam. But still, they are nice.

3. One more set of exercises. https://github.com/eficode-academy/git-katas. A bit simpler, in my opinion, and more related to everyday cases. They have more than 1K stars on GitHub and appear up-to-date and relevant.

Paid resources:

1. Udemy course by “Academind by Maximilian Schwarzmüller” can be found here https://www.udemy.com/course/git-github-practical-guide/ and has 4.7 rating. It’s short and well compressed and covers Git and GitHub, explaining the main concepts quite effectively. However, in advanced topics I discovered something new for myself, even considering my relatively long personal history with Git. Course is pretty practical, everything well illustrated by live demos that can be tried locally and used as labs.
2. Udemy course by Colt Steele with 4.8 stars, and it is well deserved as for me. https://www.udemy.com/course/git-and-github-bootcamp. It’s longer than the first one and has more detailed explanations, which would be useful for those who just started their journey. The instructor’s teaching style is nice, with many real-world examples, graphics, and schemas that help students understand the content well. I particularly enjoyed the ‘Git behind the scenes — Hashing & Objects’ section. Although the content here may not be needed in practice, to be honest, it’s always nice to know what is happening in the .git directory when you are creating commits and tags.

As it mentioned earlier, there are a lot of study resources in the Internet, and everybody can found something that suites well. If you have any resources available that are 3, 4, or even 5 years old, they are still good enough for studying Git. All the concepts and commands are well-established and will not be outdated.

The exam guide:

Taking AWS or HashiCorp exam guides as an example, I was somewhat disappointed by the Linux Foundation’s exam guide and explanations. I hope LF will address this soon. It’s not a guide at all; it consists of just several sentences about what they want from candidates. There’s nothing about topics covered, recommendations, the number of questions, what to expect in the exam environment, retake policies, etc. The exam itself is not hard at all, but I would expect more accurate preparation and examination materials in the future. However, for today, we have what we have.

AI proctoring:

AI proctoring has almost no difference from human proctoring you would expect at platforms like Kryterion or PSI. You need to install a browser plugin and use the browser where it was installed while taking the exam. Before the exam, you will be asked by text message to show your room, desk, ID, and everything should be in line with the policy, which is well described. It’s pretty standard: nothing on the desk, no notes on the walls, nobody but yourself in the room, no headphones, and no second monitors. The camera and mic will be on throughout the whole assessment, and then the recording will be reviewed. They promised the results in 24 hours, and mine arrived exactly 24 hours after I pressed the finish button, minute to minute.

The exam:

The exam uses a browser-based environment. A brief walkthrough of the interface happens at the beginning, and the time spent on it will not be counted. If you are familiar with platforms like KataCoda or KodeKloud or W3Schools, it’s pretty much the same — a browser-based terminal on one side and tasks on the other. Personally, I had no issues with the platform; everything worked. The browser terminal might be a bit less smooth than your homegrown zsh with carefully selected plugins, fonts, and color schemes, but it’s still functional. Of course, your custom shortcuts and aliases will not work, so if you are an experienced person, you might be in a less advantageous situation than a newbie.

I received nine practical tasks, which I found to be of easy to moderate difficulty. Although I had 40 minutes, I spent around 25 minutes to solve them. The task descriptions were straightforward, and I found the wording clear enough. There were no theoretical questions for me, only performance-based tasks where you had to do something with the provided repository. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but you don’t need to push your changes to the remote, and technically you can’t. You should do what the task demands and leave it at the local repository.

Two of my tasks were related to not changing anything but just finding information in the provided setup. In these cases, you should investigate the environment with git commands in the terminal, and you’ll have the field where the requested information should be passed.

The main topics are related to day-to-day Git activities, such as branching, committing, working with commit history, comparing commits, understanding your changes, and working with remote repositories. My set of questions didn’t cover any advanced-level things like ‘git hash-object’ at all. I would say any professional who works with Git command line daily or weekly can pass the exam with minimal to no preparation.

Conclusion:

This exam can be an interesting experience for mature professionals to check their knowledge and recall things that might be known by the fingers but forgotten by the mind. It’s cost-effective in terms of money, preparation time, and exam time. It never expires and is 100% practical, which is always great.

For engineers who have just started this journey, it’s a good opportunity to study the universal tool used literally everywhere and demonstrate the ability to use it correctly. And, of course, to build good usage patterns and habits from the beginning. I would recommend investing some time in this exam for them.