Road to Symfony 5 Certification

last week, and after a long journey, I did pass the Symfony 5 certification. I’ve shared this great achievement in twitter and LinkedIn and received a lot of motivating messages from my network and the Symfony Community. I also got a lot of messages from people asking about the certification and how to get certified. This is why I decided to write this blog post to share my experience and tips that I hope will be useful for people planning to take the certification exam.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” _ Socrates

I’ve been working with Symfony for more than five years in large projects and small ones. I’m always amazed by the quality, extensibility of the framework and especially by how fast it grows ( special thanks to all the contributors). However, as Symfony evolves? and PHP gets more and more features, things change. We have to follow these changes, deprecations, new components, and new features to avoid reinventing the wheel and take advantage of the power of the framework. so the best way, in my opinion, to take a deep dive into all the new features and components is to take the certification exam that covers all major and important topics about the framework.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail..” _ Benjamin Franklin

Great, now I’m motivated to take the exam, I need a plan, how to prepare for it?

• Try to find a friend or someone planning to get certified:

@ATailouloute was my buddy during this journey, with a companion like him, you can’t lose motivation, he also created two React applications especially for this purpose to track time and another one to flashcard notes. It was very useful to take 30 min or one hour a day to just talk about a random topic from the certification.

• Set a deadline: without a deadline, you can’t focus on how much time you should give to cover a topic, actually, this follows Parkinson’s law “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
• use a strategy: to prepare, you will need to set up a strategy, as an example, you can learn Topic by Topic, read the documentation of the topic, check the code, try to test some obscure areas of the code, check the configuration reference …

“Be ready to fail ’cause only then you are ready to succeed.”

hours of hard work and preparation are behind us now, time to take the certification exam.

At this stage, one thing that you have to tell yourself, you now know a lot more about the framework, about hidden features and probably during this journey, you contributed back somehow to the framework. so don’t be afraid to fail.

“Push yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.”

the truth is, it was a fun and long journey, with a lot of new stuff to discover, a great way to explore some areas that we don’t often use in projects and a nice way to auto challenge our knowledge.

During the preparation, I’ve submitted more than 10 PRs to Symfony, I’ve discussed topics and ideas with people about different topics.

so, passing the certification for me is beneficial even if you fail ( don’t forget, you always have a second chance ).