The Certified Q&A — Associate Cloud Engineer, Question 1
This post details out the approach I’ve taken in creating The Certified Q&A series. We will take the first question from the Associate Cloud Engineer as the sample.
The video is here:
The question and urging you to attempt the question yourself first.
All videos will start with the question slide. You are highly encouraged to — and if I had a choice, I would force you to — first answer the question yourself. The answer for a particular question isn’t as important as understanding the process. You might get it wrong on your attempt. But nobody is watching. So go ahead and do it yourself.
Don’t jump to an answer — “must be C”. Instead, explain to yourself why the other answers are wrong. Later when you hear the approach I take, it will be much stronger learning when you make slight course corrections in your approach.
Key parts of the question to focus on.
Some of the questions are long and un-wieldy. Some parts also purposely try to throw you off. If you can get to focus on a few key nouns, it will help you focus. Then again, it is a matter of experience that will bring you that skill. Over time, once you work through a few questions and watch my solutions to it, it should come to you naturally.
Then, some learning.
In this case, answering this question needs some understanding about available technologies, solutions, and practices.
Wherever we have an opportunity to learn something, we dive into the docs and principles. This will give you learning in context, making it more relevant and recallable.
Work through the answer options
Based on what we learned, we are now in a good position to make a choice on each of the options. Depending on the option, we might again go into the docs.
You will hear me talk a lot about my approach in this section. You will get a view into how I think through these answer options. For example, one thing that I realized I always do:
Even if I am sure about an answer, I always double check that I can safely eliminate all the others.
If you have worked through the question yourself and made a mental note of your approach, it will be very useful to assess whether what you do works or if you need to modify your approach based on mine.
Confirm our Answers
We’ll occasionally be in a situation where we have to make guesses, because there will always be gaps in our knowledge and/or memory. In this section we will confirm our answer. Along the way, we will learn concepts that strengthen that make this answer correct.
Key Learnings
I then summarize the key learnings from this exercise. This repetition will help reinforce some of the ideas we worked through earlier. Repetition is the key to retaining information — we do that at the end of each question and also across some questions.
However, in our ‘scenario based solutioning’ approach, we don’t suffer the tedium that accompanies repetition because each is in a new context and you will be applying your knowledge. The adrenaline boost from getting it right each time builds one of the most important things that other approaches will not give: confidence.
You can also come back to this slide as a quick reference any time.
Additional Tips
Just before we wrap up, every once in a while, I might have an additional tip that could help you on the exam.
References
I wanted to keep the videos reasonably short without compromising on content. I see that each video is between 7 to 15 minutes long. But that is after many hours of research going through the docs, online articles, and also trying out certain steps on an actual GCP project. There’s definitely more than what I can fit into a video while holding your attention. We therefore wrap up with references that you can dig deeper into.
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