I have booked the Claude Certified Developer – Foundations exam for Tuesday 3 November, and this is the first entry of a journal I will keep every Sunday until then. The whole plan, the study material and the practice bank live in a tracker page on this site; the journey page is here.
What week 0 was for
Two short days of administration so that from tomorrow every session is pure study: exam registered and paid, Pearson VUE profile checked against my ID, the OnVUE system test passed on the laptop I will use, a Claude Console workspace with a spend limit, a lab repository with a first client.messages.create() call, and the official exam guide read line by line.
What the blueprint told me
The exam is 53 questions in 120 minutes with a scaled pass mark of 720. Applications & Integration alone is a third of it, and when you read its sub-skills — requirements, systems life cycle, software engineering foundations, application design, configuration management — about a quarter of the whole exam is engineering judgement rather than API trivia. That suits a DevOps background. What does not suit it is the Python: there is none on my CV, and the API mechanics questions turn on reading Python snippets quickly. So the labs are typed by hand, not generated.
The other surprise was how far the live documentation has moved from what the blueprint was written against: prefill is gone on the newest models, manual thinking budgets gave way to an effort parameter, MCP went stateless in July. The tracker keeps a “then vs now” note wherever that matters, because the exam may still ask the older question.
Plan for week 1
Chapter 1, Messages API foundations: request and response anatomy, streaming events, structured outputs, vision and PDFs, then the Academy course modules and a review day with the first domain quiz. Next entry on Sunday 13 September.