My thoughts on Acquia Certified Developer Exam for Drupal 8

I passed the Acquia Certified Drupal 8 Developer Exam couple of months ago and decided to post my thoughts. The exam deals with general concepts of web development (10%), site building (30%), theme development (25%) and custom module development (35%). At the time of this writing, the passing rate is 65%.

Fundamental web development section covers questions from CSS, jQuery and Git commands. Since, this is a very large subject matter, I went with my gut instincts for this section. Fortunately, I was able to answer all the questions from this section.

Site building is all about what you can accomplish with Drupal's admin interface. If you have done enough site building work as per Acquia's study guide, then this should be a good area to rack up points. But, scenario based site building questions were long and time consuming as compared to other sections. A couple of questions were really trickier for me.

For front-end section, I suggest Drupal's own theming document. As a back-end developer, I don't build themes at my work. But I studied theme structure, common preprocess functions, how to override twig, how to create custom twig template, twig syntax, twig filters, how to add hook suggestions. List is quite long. Questions from this section were quite straightforward. 

In back-end development, prerequisites are procedural programming and OOPs concept. The WidgetsBurritos study guide has descent coverage of backend development. Even Examples module illustrates best practices for implementing various Drupal APIs. The best thing is to build a couple of custom modules which implement all common APIs. I answered majority of questions from this section without a second thought.

Thanks to Acquia by offering 30% discount on the exam at Drupal Camp Pune. However, after passing the exam, my current employer covered the remaining fees for which I will be always grateful. Without my mentors, I doubt I would have succeeded at this exam.

Bottom line is, this certification covers the majority of basic Drupal concepts and its best practices. My score was 81.66% and overall experience with the exam was great. It was well structured, challenging but not confusing.

Happy Drupaling!