Yep, after months — nay, years — of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, I finally went and did my CFMX Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exam. I got 91%, which means I get Advanced sta­tus. Woo-hoo!

There’s a whole stack of bad jokes about being cer­ti­fi­able that I could make right now, but I will refrain.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Andy Parry from CFUGWA who got 94% on Mon­day, and best of luck to Brett Payne-Rhodes who’s tak­ing his test on Friday.

I’d love to say our suc­cess was due to the study group that CFUGWA started, but unfor­tu­nately that kind of petered out, due to every­one really hav­ing more com­mitt­ments than free week­nights. Still, it got us all enthused so I guess it served it’s pur­pose from that point of view. I read Ben Forta’s study guide from cover to cover and then back the other way sev­eral times, did the sam­ple exams on his site, and played with Daemon’s Cer­ti­fi­able Cen­tral app. I don’t think the exam was difficult.

So now, when­ever the dis­cus­sion comes up about whether cer­ti­fi­ca­tion really means any­thing (let’s face it, it’s one of those top­ics that comes around with a reg­u­lar­ity sec­ond only to “ASP vs CF”), I can be one of those peo­ple who argues that cer­ti­fied devel­op­ers have shown intesti­nal for­ti­tude and a com­mitt­ment to their art, bull­shit bull­shit bull­shit. Actu­ally, I think the option in the feed­back sur­vey I took after the exam sums it up pretty nicely — I took the exam as a “pro­fes­sional challenge”.

So peo­ple, if you’ve been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing like I was, I say “go for it”. It was actu­ally kind of fun. And I think any­one who reg­u­larly uses CF and fol­lows mail­ing lists and blogs etc should have no prob­lem passing.