CertPal

Oracle has decided to re-brand Sun certification under its own brand name. First the sun website redirected to Oracle.com, then the javadoc links began to look more different than ever before. Now the red tinge we are all becoming familiar with has found its way into the certification domain.

So what does it mean for those that are already certified ? The gist of the changes which are effective from Sep 1 2010 are summarized below

• The change is only to the title of the certification and not its contents / syllabus.
• Old Sun exam numbers are now mapped to new ones.
• Anyone taking say a java programmer certification after Sep 1 will earn the title ‘Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 6 Programmer’ instead of ‘Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) SE 6′.
• You cannot request a certificate re-branded under Oracle if you already own a Sun certificate. You need to take the exam again or upgrade.

It was a normal day. The sun rose, birds were singing and everything seemed to be going fine until Kaboom ! A bug appeared in the live environment. Things turned downhill from there that day. But we are more interested in how things got fixed so lets focus on that.

An investigation of the code revealed that the bug had crept in because of a minor mistake. A variable was referring to the wrong column index on a table. ‘Hmmm… simple fix’ I thought. I told my manager it would not take more than 5 minutes to do. ‘Its a one line fix’. Mistake.

There were loads of other things to do after fixing this bug. This is what I ended up doing over the next 4 hours.

• Analyze if any other code flow would explode.
• Code the fix – This only took 5 minutes as expected.