Certification Programs

Society certifications are recognized wherever the Society is recognized. The Society maintains a list of such places, in a notebook.

Membership ranks are documented separately; see the Certificate of Membership, which you print yourself. This page concerns professional credentials, which are different, in ways the Committee has agreed to articulate at a later date.

The foundational credential. The candidate completes a four-hour programming examination under authentic conditions:

• No autocomplete
• No internet access
• No documentation
• A keyboard missing three keys, undisclosed which
• An unfamiliar build system configured by a former employee

Candidates who ask which three keys are missing fail the situational awareness component. Candidates who fix the build system pass with distinction but are watched thereafter.

Demonstrates the ability to convert one straightforward business requirement into:

• Seven services
• Three message queues
• A custom domain-specific language
• An eventual-consistency problem
• A conference presentation about the above

The examination is pass/fail. Historically, everyone passes; the challenge is stopping.

For professionals maintaining software where:

• The original author cannot be contacted, or asks not to be
• Tests are considered risky
• The deployment process begins with ssh and ends with a feeling
• Nobody knows whether the comments are still accurate, and checking would mean reading them

Certification is granted upon submission of a system diagram drawn from memory, with at least one component labeled "misc".

The Society's most advanced credential. The candidate must identify a genuine automation opportunity within their organization and successfully prevent it from being implemented, using only:

• Meetings
• A risk assessment in a manually formatted spreadsheet
• The phrase "we tried something like that in 2016"

Recertification is not required. The skill, once acquired, does not atrophy. It compounds.

[END OF FILE]