No Open Blockers

I got a pretty sweet Christmas present this year. Christmas day, while at my parents’ house for the holiday, I got an e-mail telling me I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam.

I spent the week before Christmas taking the RH253 Red Hat Linux Networking and Security Adminstration course out in King of Prussia. The course was being offered about 5 minutes from my friend JJ’s house, and with budgets being tight because of the economy it made sense to just stay there for the week. Amazingly, I was able to focus on studying despite he and his two roommates coming and going to various bars and what not. My discipline paid off, and I can happily say I passed the full exam, earning me the lower level Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) and my ultimate goal, the RHCE.

Due to confidentiality agreements, I can’t say much about the exam itself outside of what is already on Red Hat’s public site. What I will say is that the class was excellent. My instructor really knew his shit, and being able to interject his real world experience added an entire other level of depth to what I was learning. This wasn’t throw away knowledge that I was just learning for the exam, but rather I picked up quite a few solid Linux skills that will come in handy in a number of situations.

The one piece of advice I will give to anyone thinking of taking the exam is to practice. This isn’t something you can just memorize and spit back on the exam. You have to understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. But that’s a good thing, since it’s much more practical when you apply the certification to a job environment.

So it’s nice to be able to sit back and work on other projects (more on this soon). At the same time, there are a lot more courses available from Red Hat that I’d be stupid to not take advantage of while I work here. And the letters “RHCA” just sound so nice…