This article is a part of my DevNet Expert Journey blog series
- Part 1: Decision
- Part 2: This post
- Part 3: Intensive Study Period - Part 2
- Part 4: 1st Exam Attempt
- Part 5: 2nd Exam Attempt
- Part 6: 3rd Exam Attempt
- Part 7: 4th Exam Attempt
Intro #
Behind every person and their success, there is a story. A story about a battle with their own personality and difficult moments. A moments of hesitation and self-doubt that not everyone always wants to talk about. It’s about the fight against anxiety, fear, procrastination and stepping out of comfort zone to change their life.
Please join me on my journey through 6 months of study towards DevNet Expert - CCIE-level exam I always dreamed to get. I’m happy to share with you the first 3 months of very intensive period of time.
In a burning heart, just about to burst
There’s a quest for answers, an unquenchable thirst1
New habits #
Waking up early #
Finding time to study alongside personal life and work is challenging. Setting a goal to study for 3-4 hours daily like I did, made it even harder to maintain that balance.
I work 8 hours a day and the rest of my time was usually spent on hobbies or relaxing. I needed to find a time slot for studying. I also noticed that after 8 hours of work, my productivity wasn’t great. My brain and body had to be prepared to absorb new knowledge. I achieved this by practicing waking up at 4 AM every day.
I discovered that I could work with study materials and books more effectively in the morning, which was quite surprising to me.
Here are the key tips that help me wake up at 4:00 AM every day :down_arrow:
- I set my main alarm for 4:00 AM and four additional alarms, two minutes apart, just in case I fall asleep again.
- When I open my eyes, I count from 5 to 0 and get out of bed immediately to avoid thinking about how hard it is.
- I go to the kitchen to make coffee. Usually, after moving around the house for 2-3 minutes, I stop thinking about going back to bed and feel much better.
- The day before, I prepare a plan for what I will do the next morning. I realized it makes no sense to wake up that early if you don’t know what you’re going to do. It’s just a waste of time.
Another benefit of getting up at 4 AM is that I’m unlikely to be interrupted by unexpected meetings or tasks in the morning. It’s the complete opposite after I finish my shift, when I get phone calls, messages and reminders about things I forgot to do days ago.
Being consistent #
I always wanted to be consistent and be able to persevere in a goal that requires days, weeks, or months of taking small steps. In the past, I struggled with this, where I tend to lose interest in specific topic. I would get excited about something but quickly give up because sticking to a plan for a long time was no longer fun for me. The DevNet Expert Journey was a perfect opportunity to train my patience.
I learned, that the key to being persistent for more than two weeks is to clearly define your goals and prepare an action plan. Every time I doubted myself and felt close to giving up, my written goals helped me stay on track.
Study process #
Study challenges #
Studying has become challenging for all of us, even with unlimited resources available. In today’s world, we consume a tremendous amount of information daily through social media, blogs, videos and newspapers. Sometimes we are not even aware that we are doing it. This constant influx of information makes studying even harder, despite the abundance of resources. Although we are privileged to have so many study resources today, we face different issues compared to the past. Without the internet and with limited study materials, people were probably less distracted.
For past exams like CCNP R&S, DEVASC, or DEVCOR, my study strategy was to find the official certification guide and read it thoroughly. This approach allowed me to extract essential knowledge. However, I needed to improve this strategy for the DevNet Expert lab exam. I knew I’ll be consuming online trainings, books, articles, blogs, videos for a long period of time, daily.
The problem with the CCIE-level exam is that there is no single official certification guide that covers everything needed to pass it. You must go through many books, blogs, articles and videos to gather the necessary knowledge. This covers the theory, but what about practice? Most CCIE candidates spend months or even years practicing their skills in a lab environment. According to my research, many of them spend around 1,000 hours labbing. When I first considered preparing for this exam, these numbers were shocking to me.
My study technique #
An efficient study technique is crucial. Based on my previous experience, I didn’t want to spend hours and days searching for the perfect study plan on the internet created by someone else, because it would likely only work for that person and not necessarily for me. I wanted something I created myself, even if it wasn’t perfect.
I remember when I tried to organize my life better by looking for a planner. I spent a few days on this and ended up frustrated because I wasted a lot of time and made no progress. Every planner I found only worked for a couple of days before I got annoyed and stopped using it.
Since then, whenever I get a brilliant idea like starting to use a new “productivity” app, I think twice.
This time, I wanted to handle it on my own. Whether it worked or not, it had to be my own version of a study plan that I could improve later.
I prepared key rules for my new study technique:
- Understand how the exam looks like and keep learning from those who achieve that. This is something I did on December.
- Based on a blueprint and Software and Equipment list - identify the topics, packages, libraries, tools, that I need to understand and be comfortable with.
- Prepare study plan and assign a specific topic to study each week to keep track of progress. I made adjustments as needed because it’s hard to know exactly how much time each topic will take.
- Go through each topic in details according to my study plan. For each topic:
- Find a good book that covers tool or topic I’ll be working on, or find videos/tutorials if the area is too small to need a book (for example, a book on the Click library would be overkill, but Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible and Terraform are good examples of topics that benefit from in-depth reading).
- Make good notes from a book, so I don’t need to read it again. This is very handy because if I forget how to do something, like looping over data in Terraform, I can just refer to my notes instead of rereading the book.
- Read the book and practice what I learned, especially the parts covered in the blueprint.
- Once I feel comfortable with a topic - move on the next one
December #
Big research #
I started in December to fulfill the first point of my study technique: research.
I looked for a useful set of resources and found many interesting ones2:
Exam Blueprint and Learning Matrix - the core documents you need to start with to make a plan. When in doubt, those can help you understand what is required to tackle the exam. In the “Learning Matrix” you can find suggestions for external resources, that are mapped with specific elements from the blueprint. This is the game-changer. Pay attention to books mentioned there.
DevNet Expert Prep Program - set of meetings with DevNet Expert Team responsible for creating lab exam. They discuss several topics like: how to prepare own lab environment, how to identify topics for study and more. They also demistify some ambiguities and answer the questions. MUST WATCH!
Community Post by Karlo Bobiles who mentioned very useful key resources.
Kurt Claes, DevNet Expert Exam Program Manager had some presentations where he described what the exam looks like and what to expect.
- Developing for the future : Mastering the Cisco DevNet Expert Certification
- Decoding DevNet Expert: def ExamApproach(self, target=‘DevNet Expert’, subject=‘How and why’)
Daniel Wade was one of the very first students trying to crack the DevNet Expert lab exam. He documented his progress with two excellent ways:
- Daniel Wade’s live streams of him preparing for DevNet Expert lab exam.
- Daniel’s GitHub repository
Daniel - you did a great job with those streams. Thank you for this - from time to time along the journey I was coming back to your playlist to see what was your point of view and struggles when you studied a specific topic I had on a table at that moment. Many thanks, man!
Luca Gubler shared his experience from the Lab Exam he took. It gives you the idea of the exam experience.
- My First DevNet Expert Lab Attempt Ever
- My Second Attempt to Become a Cisco Certified DevNet Expert
- My Third And Final DevNet Expert Lab Attempt
DevNet Expert Techtorial GitHub Repository is a repository that contains a code presented during TECCRT-3778 session on Cisco Live. It provides a feeling how tasks on lab exam could look like.
List of useful articles
Prepare for the failures #
My initial estimates showed that I would need at least six months to be ready for the first attempt. This is a quite a long time, so I tried to mentally prepare myself for that period and the failures I might experience, including failed exam attempts. One of the most important things that helped me was understanding that failure is not the end of the world. The vast majority of CCIE candidates are not successful on their first attempt. Sometimes, it takes three, four, or even more attempts.
I was determined to see this through to the end and not be discouraged if my first attempt will be failed. I promised myself that whenever something didn’t go as expected during my studies, I would not punish myself for this, forget about it quickly and try again. I’ll keep trying, over and over.
January #
First task on a list #
Thanks to my study plan I knew where to start. The first topic was Terraform, because I was working with it quite often at that time and was familiar with most of the concepts. I wanted to digest into the studies smoothly, without experiencing shock, that can demotivate me.
Books have answers to our questions #
I found Yevgeniy Brikman’s book called “Terraform Up & Running”. which helped me understand specific areas of Terraform that I needed to know.
The next topic on my list was Ansible. I decided to use the same approach as I did with Terraform and got “Ansible Up & Running” by Bas Meijer, Lorin Hochstein and Rene Moser. The book made Ansible easy to understand! From that point, I realized that books like these are just collections of the authors’ experiences. I’m a big fan of learning from someone else’s experience. It’s like a friend giving you advice about a specific product.
Usually, I don’t read tech books from cover to cover. In the past, I had a huge problem with this because I thought I could only say “I read this book” if I went through every single page. This made me procrastinate because I felt I had to read all of a book’s contents and wasn’t allowed to start another book without finishing the current one. Of course, my list of books to read grew to a tremendous size, which intensified my procrastination.
Through this journey, I learned that reading tech books is about extracting important statements and solutions for your problems, rather than understanding a story like in literary books, such as fantasy or thrillers.
I also realized that sometimes I just need to dive into a single chapter of a book to get what I need to resolve an issue. The only person that forced me to read everything was ME.
YANG, NETCONF, RESTCONF #
January was also when I started learning more about YANG. I identified YANG as one of the most crucial topics because it’s hard to study other concepts that depend on YANG, like NETCONF, RESTCONF, MDT and NSO. If you hate YANG, you’d be better off falling in love a bit with it, because as you can see - you can’t move forward without knowing the basics.
DevNet Expert Bootcamp #
Originally, I thought I would be a lone wolf with my preparations. I had a blueprint and found a learning matrix with all the useful materials associated with each topic. What could go wrong? One of the mistakes I made along the journey was that I underestimated how challenging this journey would be at the beginning.
I had a good talk with J., who is CCIE-certified. He shared his journey towards earning his “number” and mentioned participating in the CCIE R&S bootcamp by the true legend - Narbik Kocharians (I always wanted to be part of his class). J. convinced me with his story to find a mentor - someone who could accelerate my studies, guide me, correct my mistakes and help me stick to my plan of taking the first attempt in June 2024.
I found Andreas Baekdahl, the very first DevNet Expert, who prepared DevNet Expert Masterclass. His achievements were impressive to me as a multi-CCIE certified engineer with tremendous experience.
I took a piece of paper again, just as I did when deciding whether pursuing the DevNet Expert certification was worth it and started writing the pros and cons of joining the masterclass.
I could continue preparing on my own and save money, but the risk of failing the exam was extremely high. Many CCIE candidates often refer to their first attempt as a “reconnaissance” mission.
Who said I’m going to pass on a second attempt?
What will I do if more than two attempts are needed? All of that costs money - each attempt is not cheap. If you are not fortunate enough to live in the city, where the Lab Exam is carried out, then you need to add costs of hotel, flight tickets and so on.
I started to realize that “saving money” could quickly turn into “losing money” due to many unsuccessful exam attempts and time wasted. I wanted to reduce the risk of losing both time and money and avoid repeatedly attempting the exam.
What convinced me was that Andreas provides access to his lab environment and over 10,000 (!!!) exercises for the students. Additionally, there are four mock labs, each graded by Andreas himself with feedback on what could be improved.
I made the decision and signed up for April’s bootcamp.
February #
Cisco Live #
I’ve been selected to address our automation considerations at Cisco Live in Amsterdam. Besides having many beneficial talks, I was honored to meet Hank Preston as part of the Meet the Engineer program. In my opinion, this part of CL is one of the greatest values you get with your Cisco Live pass. We had a great conversation and I received some useful tips from him about preparing for the DevNet Expert exam.
One useful thing I didn’t know is that every task on the lab exam has a specific number of points associated with it and this is visible during the exam. This tip is especially helpful when you have a limited amount of time and need to decide which tasks to prioritize.
I participated in the DevNet Expert Techtorial led by Hank Preston, Joe Clarke and Ramses Smeyers. Even though I did extensive research in December to understand how the exam works, I still gained some interesting insights from this session. :saluting_face:
I also had the pleasure of meeting Daniel Kuhl in Amsterdam and we had a great conversation. It’s worth taking a look at Daniel’s 100 Days of DevNet Expert Challenge, where he shared his journey toward his lab exam attempt. I admire Daniel for his honesty; when he needed to take a break, he simply informed everyone that it was time to spend with his family. This showed me how important it is to take breaks and how honesty is a valuable trait nowadays.
Daniel, even though you had to change your plans, you won. You demonstrated that it’s possible to stay on track, stay motivated and consistently make small steps daily toward success. Thank you for your effort!
NSO and MDT #
Once I returned home from Amsterdam, I resumed my studies. The next topics on my study plan were NSO (Network Services Orchestrator), Model-driven Telemetry and TIG (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) Stack. The Learning Labs provided a good starting point for these topics. Before diving into my studies, I watched a few Cisco Live presentations about these subjects and revisited the DEVCOR Official Cert Guide to strengthen my MDT skills. Additionally, I created a TIG Stack from scratch to understand its building blocks.
Let’s book the lab exam! #
My goal was to have a first exam attempt somewhere in the middle of a year. June seemed to be a good plan. I wanted to book the lab exam few months in advance, so I feel the pressure, that there is a job to do in June. Having a deadline made it easier to adjust my study plan leading up to the exam day. I spent a lot of money and time - I didn’t want it to be wasted, so I paid even more attention to keep track on my progress with study plan.
Once I booked the exam on a Cisco portal, I got confirmation on my mail that exam will take place on June 3rd.
Summary #
Thank you for getting this far! I hope my story gives you an overview how the process looked like, but this is just the beginning. In Part 2, I’ll talk about remaining months up to the first lab exam attempt.
I’ll be more than happy to have a chat with you on LinkedIn, or via e-mail to know your opinion and thoughts on the content you see here. See you!
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Lyrics from Survivor - Burning Heart - a beautiful song that helped me every time I was close to giving up. ↩︎
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List of useful resources will be updated every time I’ll find something interesting. ↩︎