Yes. I have passed the magento associate developer exam. This is the link that leads to my Magento certificate url. https://u.magento.com/certification/directory/dev/3306187/

I have 8 months of work experience solely on Magento and failed three times before passing this test. First time I got not even 40%, (38%). Second time about 50%, third time about 60%, and last I got 73%, which is 5% above the cutline. I have studied a lot for this test. I have studied after work, and also weekends for this test.

This is the percentage I got from each areas.

  • Magento Architecture & Customization Techniques 89.4%
  • Request Flow Processing 100%
  • Customizing Magento UI 66.66%
  • Working with databases in Magento 63.63%
  • Developing with adminhtml 85.71%
  • Customizing Magento Business logic 40.00%

Compared to the first time, it is a tremendous progress. But Customizing Magento Business is similar as 40%. This is probably because customizing magento business logic is related to experience.

I will also list out the resources I have used to passed the test.

  1. alanstorm.com - bible
  2. Magento 2 Developer's guide (Bought by Amazon) Author: Branko Ajzele
  3. No frills Magento 2 Layout (Frontend related) - by Alan Storm
  4. Magento 2 Developer Document (https://devdocs.magento.com) - config related
  5. Swiftotter's study Guide (Associate Developer) - Test preparation
  6. Magento Source code itself

Local Environments used :

  1. MAMP (Easy to configure, easy to switch php, slow and heavy)
  2. Laravel Valet (Easy to configure, hard to switch php, faster not able to handle big db)
  3. Vagrant (Hard to configure, but most stable)

The most hard thing about preparin this test was that I did not have good study material. Of course the swiftotter's guide helped a lot. It was 150 pages, and it helped a lot. First I thought if I master that, I would be able to pass the test.

I was wrong.

The swiftotter guidebook was just a test guide, and you would have to understand everything in the swiftotter guide to pass the test. Just looking at the test guide would not make you understand this. To understand this, you have to understand Magento, and to do it, you would have to understand. A good start place would be alanstorm's Magento 2 for PHP MVC Developers tutorial. This tutorial is good because it enables you to follow the tutorial. Also, Magento 2 Object System is also helpful. Magento 2 No Frills Layout is good for frontend. Magento 2 source code is the real good source and you will understand a lot when you go into source code. But it is too much...

It was a great journey, and when I started learning magento, I didn't know it was gonna take this long to get this cert. Now I have more experience and knowledge about Magento, and I will get more certs. From now on I will prepare for the frontend Magento Professional Certificate.