How I earned my AWS certifications as a busy developer

I work as a software developer at Redspace, and if you have ever tried to study for a certification while holding down a full-time engineering job, you already know the problem. There is never a clean block of time. There is always a deploy, a bug, or a meeting that runs long. So when I decided to go after my AWS certifications, I knew my plan had to survive real life, not some fantasy version of it where I had three quiet hours every evening.

Here is how it actually went, mistakes and all.

I started where everyone says to start: the docs

My first move was reading. A lot of it. AWS documentation is dense, but it is the source of truth, so I spent my first couple of weeks going through the core services and the whitepapers people kept recommending. It gave me a foundation. But I will be honest, reading alone did not make anything stick. I could recognize a concept on the page and still freeze if you asked me to explain it out loud.

Stephane Maarek carried me

Then I found Stephane Maarek's courses on Udemy. If you are studying for anything AWS, you already know the name. The man is the best. He explains services in a way that finally made them click for me, and the pacing was perfect for watching on my commute or during lunch. I put in countless minutes, sometimes at 1.5x speed, sometimes rewinding the same five minutes three times until it landed.

The best part of his courses was the practice exams built into them. I took every one. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a passenger and started feeling like I was actually training for the test. The courses gave me knowledge. The practice questions told me whether that knowledge was real.

Then a busy week would hit

Here is the part nobody warns you about. The courses were great, and the knowledge stayed with me for a while. But the second a busy week hit at work, a release, an incident, a stretch of long days, my study streak fell apart. I would go five or six days without touching my prep, and when I came back I felt like the concepts were slipping through my fingers. IAM policies, VPC peering, the difference between an SQS queue and an SNS topic under pressure, all of it started to feel fuzzy again.

That feeling of forgetting is what kills most people's certification plans. It is not that the material is too hard. It is that life interrupts you, and every interruption feels like it wipes out a little bit of progress.

The one habit that kept me sane

The thing that saved me was quick self-testing. Whenever I had a spare ten minutes, I would use AI to check my understanding of one specific concept. I would ask it to quiz me on S3 storage classes, or Lambda concurrency, and I would answer the questions right there. It was fast, it was on demand, and it kept my brain in the game even during the weeks I could not sit through a full lecture.

Honestly, this is the only reason I stayed sharp. Active recall beats re-reading every single time. Answering a question forces you to commit, and the moment you get one wrong, that concept burns itself into your memory in a way that passively watching a video never does.

But it was a mess to manage

As much as the AI quizzing helped, the workflow was rough. Two things drove me crazy.

First, there was no progress tracking. Every session started from zero. I had no idea which concepts I kept missing, which ones I had actually mastered, or whether I was improving week over week. It was all vibes. I felt ready, but I could not prove it to myself.

Second, answering multiple choice questions inside a chatbot is genuinely painful. I would often generate forty or sixty questions on a single concept, and my screen was too small to see a full question next to its options. I was constantly scrolling up and down just to match the question to the right letter, A, B, C, or D. On a phone it was even worse. What should have been a two minute drill turned into a scrolling exercise.

It was clunky, but it was always worth it. The more quiz practice I did, the more ready I felt. By the time I sat the real exam, the questions felt familiar, because I had already trained the exact muscle they were testing.

What I would tell my past self

If I could go back, I would tell myself three things.

• Read to build a base, but do not confuse reading with knowing. The docs and courses are the input. Testing yourself is the proof.

• Protect the habit, not the streak. A busy week will break your streak, and that is fine. Ten focused minutes of self-testing is enough to stop the forgetting.

• Practice questions are the real study. Everything else is just preparation for doing more questions.

Why I am building this differently now

That whole experience is why I helped build Kwizza. I wanted the thing I wished I had while studying. Clean, exam-style multiple choice questions that actually fit on the screen, with no scrolling to match a question to its answers. Real progress tracking, so you can see which domains you are weak in and watch yourself improve over time. And the ability to practice a focused set of questions on any concept in minutes, so a spare ten minutes on a busy day still counts for something.

You get the active recall that kept me sane, without the chatbot mess that made it a chore.

Frequently asked questions

How do you study for an AWS certification while working full-time?

Keep it short and consistent. Use courses and documentation to build a base, then spend most of your time on practice questions. Even ten focused minutes of active recall on a busy day beats a passive hour of re-watching videos. A quiz app that tracks your progress is what makes those small sessions add up.

Are practice questions enough to pass AWS exams?

Practice questions are the single highest-value thing you can do. They tell you what you actually know, expose your weak domains, and train you for the exact format of the real exam. Reading builds the base, but doing practice questions is what makes you ready.

Can you use AI to study for AWS certifications?

Yes, and it is a game changer for quick concept checks. The catch is that a raw chatbot has no progress tracking and makes multiple choice questions painful to answer on a small screen. A purpose-built AI quiz app fixes that, with clean questions, real scoring, and a record of which concepts you keep missing.

What is the best AI quiz app for exam prep?

You want clean, exam-style multiple choice questions, progress tracking across attempts, and the ability to drill your weak areas. That is exactly why we built Kwizza. Browse the library and take a free practice set to feel the difference.

Try it for your next exam

If you are prepping for an AWS certification, or honestly any certification, start with practice, not more passive reading. Browse the Kwizza library, pick your exam, and take a real practice set for free. See how many questions you actually get right before you decide you are ready.

Explore the Kwizza library and start practicing for free. Your future certified self will thank you.