I have cleared the CKAD! 😎

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This post was initaly posted in Mischa’s Skool Community, that I’m a part of.

I want to thank everyone in the community for their support. Special thanks to @Mischa van den Burg and @Jhonatan Magalhães for their advice and guidance! 🙌 Here is a rough timeline of my exam preparation and experience:

2 Days before the exam:

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• 6:00 PM: Attempted Sander’s CKAD sample exam as part of the course. The exam was a little tough. I faced difficulties with NetworkPolicy and Probes.
• 9:00 PM: Booked the exam since my sister was going back to school within three days, planning to spend the entire day doing Killer Shell.

1 day before the exam:

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• 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM: Had to go to a neighbouring city to get stuff my sister needed urgently (which she remembered at the last moment, as usual!).
• 7:00 PM: Finally started KillerShell, and oh boy, it is tough! I did KillerShell for one hour. I exited the exam within an hour feeling tired, frustrated, and disappointed. I went to my father and said:

Me: “Galti kar diya pops, jaldi dene ke chakar me. Ek-dou din wait karna chaiye tha” (Made a huge mistake, Dad. I should have waited and practiced more for a day or two).

Papa: “Koi badi baat nai hai! Kal nai hua, tou dobara de dena kuch din baad. Faltu ka tension mat le” (It’s not a big deal! If you don’t succeed, give it again after a few days. Don’t take unnecessary tension).

I took his advice and then watched some episodes of the anime “The Misfit of Demon King Academy.” I found the following lines very amusing:

“Did you really think crushing my heart would be enough to kill me?”

“Did you really think killing me would be enough to make me die?”

“Did you really think you could stop me in my tracks, just by stopping time?”

Exam Day:

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• 9:00 AM: The exam begins!

My exam experience:

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I would say the questions were easier than expected. The environment wasn’t laggy, and you should be comfortable if you’re using an external monitor. However, as a new vim and tmux aficionado, the buck doesn’t stop here. I realized how comfy my dotfiles setup is, and how I am used to working with vim keybindings and tmux in conjunction.

To begin with, I wasted nearly 30-40 minutes on issues like the following:

• Entering set -o -vi instead of set -o vi.
• Entering setw -g mode-keys -vi in ~/.tmux.conf instead of setw -g mode-keys vi.
• Pressing “Super +1” to switch to the Firefox window.
• “Ctrl + L” shortcut for clear does not work in vi mode.
• I also was running tmux after SSH into the desired machine, which was a mistake.
• Not programming the arrow keys in my dactyl keyboard was a big mistake.

By this time, I remember the timer showing like 90 minutes left, and I was on question 7 and had already marked 3 questions as incomplete. I could not think with all this panic in the background. I drank a glass of water and tried to calm my nerves down. Tried to look at the test without the timer present, and set -o vi worked, finally! With this, I felt the tide was about to turn.

I started doing the questions one at a time. Did not create a YAML file unless I thought it was necessary. I also figured out you could click on the fields given in the question to copy them. This made my life so much easier.

When I was at the last question, I realized I still had 10 minutes left. I finished it up, reviewed the marked questions, and was trying to get ingress working somewhere when the timer finished, and I got the exam over message.

Exactly 24 hours later, I got the message that I had cleared the exam!

Har Har Mahadev!