The modern world of heterogeneous software engineering requires practicing professionals to use on daily basis quite a wide range of skills and tools.

One of them is Git - the ubiquitous source control management tool.

And Linux Foundation has a short and focused exam (they call it SkillCred) dedicated to it, namely the “Source Control Management with Git (SC102)”.

I purchased it last year as a part of some Black Friday deals, and now the deadline for attempting it has come.

Few certification-related remarks:

  • This certification validity does not expire :hourglass_flowing_sand:

  • There is no long check-in process for the SkillCred exams (unlike say for CKA or Microsoft certifications), everything is quite fast :+1:

    • :warning: Be warned that you won’t be picking the date and time like for the “big exams” for some later passing date, in contrast, you’ll be able to start this one right away, so please do not click on the go to exam button in your learning dashboard unless you are ready to take it, and your working environment & ID are ready too

  • :white_check_mark: I’ve put an effort into refreshing and upskilling my knowledge of the CLI way of doing things in Git (which allows you to do more than popular GUI frontends or IDE plugins). And frankly, without the preparation, it would be way more difficult to get the job done

  • The duration of the exam is 45 minutes including the time to look around in the exam GUI!!! :astonished::fearful::scream: So, I advice to skip the introductory pages as fast as possible to save more time for the exam tasks

    • Better read the docs for the exam candidates on the Linux Foundation website to get up-to-date info on the exam environment before the exam

    • I’ve actually made this mistake earlier when I was attempting the “Shell Scripting Using Bash (SC103)” exam: I supposed that time to get myself familiar with the exam GUI and the ways to interact with it was not counted as part of the exam and, gosh, I was wrong! And the exam itself turned out to be quite nervous for me due to lack of time. Even though I knew all the topics I didn’t have time to complete everything. For example, I needed to figure out some specific command switch (as well as its corresponding formatting placeholders) in one command to make it format the output the way that shows some specific data, and based on that data I was required to make some adjustments in the filesystem. But don’t worry, I passed it

  • Beware that in the exam: “Each exam task is completed in a dedicated Linux Virtual Machine (VM). These VMs run in the browser as needed, and are not stored”. When you finish and submit the task it makes a snapshot of that VM which might take some time but the exam timer still goes on during this operation. For me, it was nervous to lose time on this

  • My Git exam had 10 tasks. Some of them expected me to figure something out in the console and then type the answer into some field to the left of the terminal window (aka in the task/question section). Others required me to perform some operations in the system with the help of Git and leave it as is, and the system was snapshotted for later checks

  • With all the preparation done, I found the exam quite an easy one. Perhaps, I just was lucky with the selected subset of tasks and still remain a Git noob :man_shrugging::thinking::wink:

  • And yes, I passed it, got 100% (with 70% as the passing threshold)

I know Git kung fu

:v: