Linux Foundation Node.js Services Developer Certification

After my experience taking the previous certification in this series (Node.js Application Developer) I was interested in closing out the series and achieving this certificate. Luckily, a site-wide sale and permission from my manager allowed that to happen. I recently learned between the time I achieved the last one and working towards this one, the Linux Foundation will no longer be serving these Node.js certificates. They stopped being sold at the end of April this year, with no further eloboration. As such these articles will probably be of no use to people now, as I assume that if the courses start being served again by some other group, or if the Linux Foundation launches a new series of courses in this area, this information would certainly be out of date. I capture my thoughts here for the sake of completionism.

Training material

Once again, I bought the bundle containing the certificate and the preparation course. The course was entirely text-based and contained 10 chapters covering back-end topics such as developing RESTful servers, serving templated HTML, error handling and more. The material is very well written and covers all the important subjects one needs to know for the exam. Ttwo Node.js frameworks are covered: Express and Fastify. All code examples are given in two versions for both of the frameworks. The version of Express covered is 4, the justification being that one working in the field is more and likely to encounter legacy code written in Express 4 over 5 (which instinctively feels true). The material also gives good background information, such as Express 4 not properly supporting async functions in route handlers and the possibility of them causing memory leaks.

One complaint of the material is that only 2 short chapters are dedicated to security practices and of those practices the only ones covered were: Parameter pollution, route validation and IP blocking. If there was a seperate Node.js Security certification the lack of detail would make more sense, but since there isn't it seems a bit of an oversight giving such little time to such an important subject.

Just like the last certificate, the most important studying method is downloading and completing the provided code projects. There are questions for every subject covered and they are the best way to make sure you were actually paying attention the material!

Ultimately, this course is the only training material I needed for the exam. While the provided exam guide recommends other training materials such as NodeSchool or this book I did not use them for this certification (not a knock on these materials, I'm sure they are also useful on their own!)

The exam

I previously wrote a three part blog post about my experiences taking the previous certificate in the series. If you've read that, Pretty much everything I wrote still applies here. If not I'd recommend reading the third part to get my thoughts on it. A short summary of the important points:

The time limit is the same (2 hours) and the proctoring software is the same. You will want a stable and fast connection for the least amount of suffering. Time management will be important, you don't want to spend too much time on hard questions when you can work on other ones you'll have an easier time with first. And finally, for those with Nordic keyboard layouts like me, you will need to rely on the provided on-screen keyboard for brackets and other such characters. Make sure to read the description of every question VERY carefully so you understand the requirements of the code you'll need to write. You don't want to lose points to dyslexia!

And most importantly, remember that you get one free retake with purchase of the certificate exam! Take a breath and try not to stress too much.

Final thoughts

Just like the previous certification, I would say this course was useful. It did a good job of teaching new things, reinforcing important subjects and testing competency in them well. Whether coding language certificates are useful in employment is a debate that is still raging to this day and it is a topic I possess no novel thoughts on, but for personal development I can say that it has been a useful experience. It is a shame that they are no longer being offered for purchase. Hopefully if a new Node.js certificate series emerges that they match or surpass the quality of these.