 Okay, I'm Dave, I'm from near form. Hey, I'm Adrian, I work for Notars. And we're super excited to share what we've been working on for quite some time with the OpenJS Foundation. It's the node certifications with an S, spoiler alert. Yeah, we have been working together for a year on this project. Here we have the URL for the certification. You want more information about this talk. You can take a picture if you want. You can visit this link later. So, let's start from the beginning. It really takes a community. This was born as a community for, this was born at the very same conference we are right now. That was in Austin in 2016, where Tracy Hines did the initial kickstart of this project. Here we are seeing some faces of the community involved in this project. So, I'm sorry if I'm missing someone there. I promise I will put the picture back if you reach to me later. So yeah, thanks to the community for helping with this. Not only was it a cross-community effort, it's also became a cross-organizational effort. These are the organizations involved. Near form, the company I'm working with in a technical and authoring capacity. NodeSource provides operational support and reviewing. OpenJS is the leadership coordination in the certified body. PSI for proctoring, which we're gonna get into a little bit more later. And Trubility are the remote exam platform. So, why a certification and why now? Well, in my opinion, the industry has got to a sort of a maturation point where it has grown over the years to becoming much more involved in larger scale projects. And in the tech industry in general, we have demand versus availability issue. The demand is high and the availability can be difficult. So what we need is a kind of an optimization where we can standardize a verification of skill level. And that's what we're doing with these certifications. And it's also about opportunity creation where we can open doors to allow people to come via other routes than the typical. Because as I said, there is a demand versus availability issue. So the certification was kicked off, as Adrian said, in 2016 in Austin. And we had a group of people from across the industry. We had NodeSource and near-film there. There was also, I believe, Walmart, Netflix, GoDaddy, Tierney's nodding. Forgive me if I've forgotten anyone. Tinney was there. Right there in that hat, he was there. Actually, we were, you know, that was the avatar there, yeah. So in Austin, we decided upon these principles that the certification should be outcome focused, that it should be framework and library agnostic, that it should support real world practices, that it was problem solving over puzzle solving. So we wanted to try to distill it down to actually solving problems that you would face in everyday life, rather than just technical conundrums. And we also wanted to not care about how it was implemented, just that it was, that it solved whatever problem was being presented. In terms of quality assurance certification, all of the questions have been peer reviewed by industry leaders, including Adrian, but also, you may know Mateus, Booz, Charlie Robbins, or Luca Muraschi, these are all very technical people that are reviewed. It was also alpha tested in a sort of free form feedback way. It was beta tested with around 150 testers. And when we started off in Austin in 2016, we also had a psychometrician guiding us regarding the topics and the domains and how to break things up. And before we went live, it also went for a final psychometric review with a few more tweaks. In terms of the certification, having long term integrity as in making it so that it's not easy to commoditize from a cheating aspect, there is variance. You don't necessarily get the same exact questions every time you take it. It's procted by humans. We're also gonna have release cycles. We're gonna keep it up to date, which we'll talk about more later. And we also have the ability to sample any captured sessions and review them. So now we are going to discuss a little bit of what is actually to take a certification test. So here are the exam expectations for you. You will be taking the test using a remote desktop environment. This will work in a browser tab. So you will use a browser to actually solve the test. It will be remotely proctored. So we will have a real human, checking the webcam and checking the desktop, everything you are doing for the test. So you can use any tool that you want, any library that you prefer to solve the problems. As they already explained, we are checking for the results. We are not checking for the process you will do to accomplish the solution. And you can use any online resource. So you can use the nodocontation, wherever you want, but not the stack overflow or related size because we don't want you to be copying and pasting code in the machine. So yeah, you will get resources to remember how to solve anything, but you can copy and paste the code. So this virtual machine, it will be a desktop Linux. It will be Mate. So you have to be a little bit familiar with this. You will have Visual Studio Code and BIM to solve as code editors. You will have Postman, so you can check the solution for your RESTful API questions. You will have Mate terminal and Visual Studio Code terminal and you will have Chrome as the default browser. So here's a screenshot of a machine. This is how it actually looks. At the beginning of the test, you will receive instructions in this initial screen. You will have a timer at the corner. You can see you will have two hours to solve the test, every test. And yeah, you basically will read all the instructions in this tab and you will use code or BIM, wherever you prefer to actually solve this. So let's discuss a little bit about the exam overview. So they already said that we have two certifications. We have Node.js Applications Developer and we have Node.js Service Developer. So let's discuss. So the Node Application Developer exam is about assessing your effectiveness at creating any type of Node.js application. So the way that we did that is we took an intersection of use cases and skills that would be required and we test those rather than testing, X application, Y application. Theoretically, by taking this exam, you should be verified at a basic fundamental level for overall competency with creating servers, creating desktop applications. All the things that Miles was actually talking about before, this is what we're testing for. This is basic fundamental Node.js knowledge in terms of being able to use Node.js. You can use the core APIs or you can use libraries. It doesn't matter whether you use ecosystem or core. The point is, can you wield it effectively to create any type of application? The only thing that's missing from the Node Application Developer exam is the domains around servers because let me come back to that in a second. I should have gone over this more. Fundamental concepts. It covers common use cases, key transferable skills, everything I just said and it's marked on outcomes and API knowledge. It's library and framework and now stick. In the Node Application Developer exam, there's lots of small questions that are about five to 10 minutes each. That's different to the other one. And there's 13 topic domains. Here's the secret source. Those are the things you need to know and those are the way things for them and here's a horrific colorful monstrosity for you to enjoy with those in a pie chart as well. As I was saying, the only thing that isn't there is the service stuff because... So we have Node.js Service Developer certification. This is a total different certification. Let's move. This will test, let's move to the next one. Yeah. So this will test Practical Effect Invest using Node.js for real common problems creating servers and creating RESTful APIs. So, let's move. So you will be creating basically servers, RESTful APIs and testing your security practices around these applications. So you will find this is way different. You will have like a small set of questions but every question will definitely take some time. So every question will take you between 15 to 30 minutes. So you definitely need to code like a regular Node.js web application, RESTful API. And you can use wherever you want. We already said that. You can use Express, you can use HTTP Core, you can use Fastify that, you know, just join the foundation, that's nice. So it's basically two broad domains. We have servers and services which is 70% of the test and security practices around this kind of application that is 2% of the test. So to pass any of these certifications you will need to score at least 68%. I know it looks a little bit low but it's tricky, it's actually really complex. You really need preparation for this. You really need to study and be prepared. But don't worry, if you fail to score 68%, we have a free retake. So if you missed the first time then the second one, you can actually be familiar with the test and take another chance to pass. So now we come to the issue of pricing. What's it gonna cost you? When the certification was first launched in October, so some people might be aware that there was some pushback on the price at that time, which is very fair. The problem with setting a price, a global price is that socioeconomic status even in the same country and around the world, they differ. So we wanted to do this, as I said earlier, as a door opening exercise, not as a gate keeping exercise. So the exam price as it stands is $300 per exam. Percertification. Percertification, yeah. So in terms of addressing that potential imbalance for some people, that $300 is totally affordable for companies that want to have employees certified. So that's staying for that purpose. But it's not affordable for everyone. So when we've initially launched certification, Robin wrote a blog post which you can find here that was a response to some of the concerns around pricing and how we might be able to address that moving forward. So one of the key ways that the foundation wants to address this moving forward is with scholarships. Specifically, scholarships partnering with other organizations that represent specific groups of people that the organization, that the foundation can grant sets of scholarships to. In order to do that, we really need for people to start talking to each other. So if you do represent an organization or a group in Canada, in the US, or anywhere around the world, please come talk to me, come talk to Adrian, come talk to Robin. From that blog post you can find Robin's email, you can email her because we'd really like to start moving with this and making sure that we can make this available to as many people as possible. The other way. We have another way to actually solve this problem in the immediate term. Right now we have some promotions and we're working to create more. Right now, the test, every test if you want to take one exam, it will cost you just 180. So until tomorrow. Until tomorrow. But here's the good part. So you can pay now, but you can schedule your test in the future. So right now you can actually pay for the certification at this price and said that you're going to take the test in two months. So that will give you two months to actually be prepared and take the test. So let's take advantage of this. If you want both certifications right now is 210. So it's preferable, yeah. Both exams for that. And as I already said, you can say I'm going to take this one in two months, I'm going to take this one in three months forever and you will be able to actually take it. So yeah, what is the future of this certification? So we are going to keep working on the pricing issue. I mean, this has been the main concern of the community. For me, I have to fill in, because I'm from South America, I represent a lot of communities there that can actually afford this price. So we are going to work through this issue to provide an accessible price for everybody. Also moving forward, we're going to be making sure that the certification stays evergreen. We're going to synchronize it with the node long-term support schedule. So currently the certification is against node 10. In April, node 10 is going into maintenance and node 12 becomes the, is already the LTS, but will become the remaining LTS. So in April, we'll do another release for the node 12 LTS. And then in October, roughly node 14 will be released and we'll have the exam updated for that. So as Miles was saying about the ES6 modules and so forth, if that lands in node 14, the certification will be adapted for that so that it stays relevant, that it stays current. We'll also be tracking industry-based practices and conventions and assessing on a continual basis the certification for those needs. Also in the future, more certifications? Question mark? So yeah, any ideas of how you would want to see that? Again, we're on Twitter, come talk to us, talk to Robin. We're really interested in hearing what you have to say. If you have more ideas, we are open to any comment. This, as I already said at the beginning of the talk, it takes a community. So if you want to be part of this, please come with ideas, please come to help us. Talk to us. And yeah, we are having, if you're interested in being certified, we are having a workshop, they have the information. Well, the information is right there. It's 2 p.m. later on today. Room 501A, both Adrienne and myself will be there. We have no source of setup, an environment that's essentially very similar to the exam environment so you can have a play with it and see how it feels. Here is the URL again, if you want more information, here is take a picture, visit later, and join us to the workshop that we are doing. If you follow us on Twitter, I've just, I tweeted out the slides for this before we started, so if you want to get the slides and see those codes or go over them, find me on Twitter. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.