Now that Acquia has officially announced its intentions to provide certification for its Drupal related products, I'd like to share a personal success story. In 2000, when I decided to leave my position in a German orchestra and become a programmer, I desperately needed an opportunity to gain practical knowledge and prove that I had it. The prospect of pursuing a whole college degree wasn't attractive as I didn't have enough money to pay tuition for so many classes. I didn't know about or understand open source software, and I wouldn't have been able to contribute anyway as I was a complete beginner. Installing Drupal would have been too big a task. Furthermore, the amount of knowledge and skills involved in programming seemed endless to me. Every concept hid five other concepts, which in turn depended on even more concepts or information that was completely missing. It was quite difficult to find any material that started at step 1 and proceeded to step 2, in that order.

Two things came together to help me out of the beginner's quagmire and put me on the road to becoming a competent programmer. The first was a Java instructor at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). I took three online courses from an instructor named Mark Cohen and managed to lay the groundwork for further learning in Java. This part would have been too hard for me to accomplish all by myself. It was hard enough that I was studying in isolation and didn't have any fellow students to help me. Without Mark's help I would have never really gotten past setting the Java classpath.

Once the groundwork was in place, I was able to effectively start studying on my own. But where should I begin, and what should be my focus? What skills would be useful to potential employers? The answer to these questions came in the form of the Sun Certified Java Developer certification program. With Sun's clear curriculum and training materials I was able to set goals and focus my studies. Furthermore, I knew that if I succeeded I would have something to point to as a measure of my abilities.

For months I worked through the preparation materials. The topics were limited to core Java principles. As opposed to the normal breadth-first "How to program Java" guides, the exam materials took a depth-first approach, delving into the subtlest details of each topic before moving on. They didn't get distracted by talking about features or techniques that weren't relevant to the core curriculum. It was first during this time that I began to completely grasp the basic concepts of object oriented programming in any depth.

The preparation materials for the exam included practice tests as well, and these were invaluable for keeping me honest. Too easily one believes a matter is learnt when in fact fog and haze might remain. The practice tests helped identify the fog and haze, especially for those topics which were either especially slippery or not inherently interesting to me. I didn't sign up to take the official test until I could pass all of the practice tests every time.

Finally I took and passed the test, and the sense of achievement was quite on par with graduating from college. I immediately began to apply for jobs, and in 2001 I began work as a Java programmer. The company I worked for, Hype.de, provided my first exposure to world-class programmers (who became my mentors), and a world-class web application framework (the Hype server) which deeply influenced my ideas of what web applications could and should do. While at Hype I discovered open source software as well.

One thing is clear. Without having passed the Sun Certified Java Developer exam I wouldn't have gotten that all-important first job. I wouldn't have learned Java well enough to have useful skills, and I wouldn't have learned the concepts of object oriented programming in the proper way. The benefit I derived from certification can't be measured. This is the inspiration I bring to the task of building Aquia's Carbon/Drupal certification programs.