I passed, I passed!

[Skip Cole]

Hi,
Just wanted to say thanks for the help I got here from you guys. I got my results back today, and I found out that I passed. I got a 142, which ain't too bad (155 to 124 pass).
I enjoyed doing this project. Of course, by the end, having seen the same code a zillion times, I was ready to just turn it in and roll the dice. The score of 142 means I overshot my mark, a 124 would have been fine by me, but I guess it is better to do too score too high than too low.
I did go a little further than the requirements required at times (I was the loser who actually created a lock file - and got beat up about it on the discussion board), but that was because I wanted to know how to do these things. (How could I call myself a Java Developer, if I didn't know how to write a lock file?)
I think the hardest part about this test is working in isolation. It is hard to keep oneself motivated. It is also hard not to fiddle with the nearly finished product forever. This forum helps people avoid those pitfalls. I think this forum is a very valuable for another reason as well: we get to practice communicating programming issues via the written word. Which seems to me to be a very important skill.
BTW, This project took me a lot of time to finish. (How much time, I'm not going to say!) When you read those postings that say things like "I did it in 52.5 hours," don't feel discouraged because you've been working at it for over a month. We all come in at different levels, but we all leave with the same certification. And programmers are notorious for underestimating the real time they have put in on things anyway :-)

Enjoy!
Skip

[joey phillip]

Congratulations Skip !
joey

[Adrian Yan]

Congrat!!!

[Kevin Cary]

Congradulations Skip:
I just finished programmer certification and now starting developer certification. Since I have JDK2 I'm guessing from your email post that I wouldn't need to buy any software to finish this project? Secondly, will I need to network any computers to test the remote user part of project?
Well done,
Kevin

[Val Dra]

Kevin you will not need another computer to test a network part of it , it can run on same machine, it would be nice to test it though on different vm's. At school i got unix and windows so i'll be testing it pretty soon.

[joey phillip]

Skip,
Did you use any design patterns for your gui part? Is it going to reduce marks, if i don't use any design pattern and implement all the code inside the actionPerformed method.

Thanks
joey

[Dilip kumar]

Congratulations ....

[Raj Mehra]

Congratulation!!!
Regards,
Raj.

[Matt DeLacey]

Skip,
A few questions:
1.) Was the written exam as straightforward as everyone claims
it to be? How much did you prepare for it?
2.) How confident were you that you would pass? I am almost finished with my project, but I keep second guessing myself. Oh maybe I should do this instead, maybe I should test this some more, maybe if I do it this way, perhaps they want more OO stuff...etc. I think the project looks and runs well, but
not sure when I KNOW it's time to submit. I'm like you, I JUST want to pass.
3.) Did you use Design Patterns? I haven't used a single Design Pattern (that I know of), but I think it's well designed and organized. Not sure if Design Patterns are a must or not.
Thanks,
Matt

[Skip Cole]

Hi All,
Regarding the Follow Up Test:
It is as straight forward as everyone says it is.
Regarding how Confident I was with my submission:
I was confident enough to bet $400 bucks of my my own money, which is essentially what you are doing when you submit - betting that it was good enough. So if $400 is a lot of money to you, then make sure you hedge your bet. But remember, you can't win if you don't play :-)
Regarding Patterns:
I used a Singleton and a Factory method in my design. I didn't really describe the patterns that Swing incorporates.
I don't know that it would count against one if you don't use patterns, but I found it useful to use them.
I used this assignment as kind of a jumping off point to start studying for the SCEA test, and for that test one definately has to know patterns. So to make this more fun, and to help me begin to learn the patterns, I tried to use a few of them here. Of course, one probably wouldn't want to do this to the extreme.
BTW, I found James W. Cooper's book on Java Design Patterns very useful for this.
Skip
PS. I forgot to mention that I basically only ran this on one machine, but I would be great to be able to test it on two. I did develope it on a Windows machine, but looked at it on a UNIX machine. I discovered that I was using some things from JDK 1.3 that way, and I changed these to work with JDK 1.2
[This message has been edited by Skip Cole (edited March 26, 2001).]

[Debajyoti Pathak]

Congrats Skip !!