Professinal Scrum Master I

Last week, I was able to become Professional Scrum Master. Can you believe that? :)

I knew some things about Scrum for some time now, but I've never attended real Scrum course until about a week ago. The course took 2-days to complete and was conducted by one of the local training centers. After the course I was given password to complete Professional Scrum Master I assessment from Scrum.org.

Except for taking Scrum training, to pass the assessment I believe you clearly need to take "Open assessment" (which is free of charge and which you can find on the same website) as many times as you need to be comfortable with passing it. The real assessment contains 80 questions while you have only 60 minutes to answer. And difficulty of number of questions is significantly higher than questions from "open" assessment. To pass the exam, you need to achieve score of at least 85%. Personally, I thought that I passed comfortably, but it turned out that I got "just" 89%.

After passing it, you need to wait for a few hours before your certificate is ready to be printed from pdf document :) Oh, and you are given the right to use the badge:

Effective Akka by Jamie Allen; O'Reilly Media

This short book, written by Jamie Allen, contains number of advises for Akka developers. I believe that you should be already familiar with Akka framework before reading the book, because the author assumes that you already know how to use at least the basic features of the framework.

First chapter of the book discusses the approaches to designing actor based applications. It's hard not to agree with the author about the presented ideas, but I think it's something that most Akka developers already know.

Effective Akka's second chapter presents two quite small patterns used in real world applications. I liked the first one, but the second one I consider a tip instead of "pattern" - like Jamie called it. Application of the pattern are presented with unit-tested source code, which is definitely a plus.

Third chapter (the last one!) presents general advises when using Akka, but I feel developers should be familiar with them already as these advises are not much different that general programming / designing rules. The only difference is that here Allen show how they are relevant to building actor based application. You will also find here ideas for creating systems with resilience and high-performance.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that the book seems nice to me. On the other hand, as Akka developer, I'd love to read a book that would push me on two levels higher in building actor systems, and this book left me a little bit disappointed in that regard.