What’s your take on certifications?
It took me over 10 years before I took my first certifications (last year at Lotusphere, crammed in 3 tests between the sessions). I never believed in certifications, I can tell some horror stories about "certified" developers that could not code very good at all. All I say is "GetNthDocument"…
At this years Lotusphere, I wanted to upgrade my Certified Application Developer to the Advanced level for 6.0/6.5, and also try to upgrade to Notes/Domino 7.0. The advanced upgrade (exam 273) was no problem, but I failed the 7 upgrade. Since I am still on R5 at work (some clients are on 7.0.2, but development has to be done for 5.0.12), I did not have that much experience of creating web services or using DB2 in Notes, which were what most of the test was about.
But what really made me wonder were all the questions about the new user interface. Is the biggest and most important thing for a developer to know that if you click "do not show this dialog again" when you get the prompt to close Designer, the prompt will also go away in the Notes client?
What about having a couple of questions about something that is really useful for a developer to know? Like how to work with lists, for example.
On the bus to the Lotusphere Wednesday party at Islands of Adventure, I was sitting next to Andr?uirard, and we talked about the tests. He said he did review the tests a while back, and they were thinking about revising them. But I did not get any word on what the current plan is.