Hello all,
I hope this is an appropriate place to post this. I'm new here so please be gentle
I recently passed
OCAJP 8 with 80%, with the help of Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff's guide (excellent book!) plus Enthuware software (also excellent!).
My background is that I have about 8-9 years experience with
Java, though Java coding has never been a primary requirement for my role. I'm a technical consultant working for a financial services company who use multiple vendor supplied middleware technologies that implement frameworks and/or 'meta languages' based on Java eg webMethods, Filenet, OutSystems, HPX, etc.
Recently (in the last 4 years or so) I've started taking Java more seriously as I wanted it to be more of a focus in my career (also because I like it) and have been actively involved in any and all Java development I could get my hands on. This has culminated in me investigating Java certification about 3 months ago and ultimately studying for and passing the OCA exam a couple of days ago.
To be honest, I didn't think I would take it any further (my company certainly doesn't require me to be certified, I just did it to help me learn and
boost confidence, also because I was a bit curious). However, I have found the actual process of studying for the exam so beneficial to my coding and overall competency that I want to carry it on.
The problem is, whilst the exposure I get to Java development at work might be enough to help with the kind of level you need for OCA (well, sort of, I still had to supplement with a fair bit of sample code), I don't think it will be quite enough for the OCP. To be honest I found the OCA exam pretty tough going (more so than I expected given my experience) though I think coding relevant 'real Java' in my job helped me a lot. I really don't want to be exclusively writing sample code for the OCP, both because I think it will be tougher to learn from it, but also because I would like to provide some additional value for someone from the lines of code I write other than passing the exam.
So, in a long winded way, what I'm saying is that I'm very keen to get involved with an open source project somehow and hopefully provide some real world benefit as well as helping me towards OCP. However, I'm not sure about the best place to start with that, and especially how to best get into a project that is going to help with the core aspects of OCP. Can anyone offer any advice? I'm not very good at inventing projects, but give me something real with a clear technical requirement, and I'll go at it like a Trojan. Just looking for some advice on the best place to start. Any and all suggestions will be considered!
Many thanks in advance and sorry for the long post!
Theo