How I passed the AWS Solutions Architect in 2 weeks

G’day, welcome to my corner of the internet. This blog post is an extension of my Reddit post, and contains tangential details of my experience preparing for and undertaking the SAA-C003 AWS Solutions Architect Exam in 2026.

You will find external links to software that I sell as we go along. Pardon the shilling.

At a glance, here is the PDF artifact that emerged from my 15 days of study:

Why 15 days?#

I am currently a graduate student in Statistics and had a 2 week break between terms. 𐃏 I have an undergraduate in Computer Science with no work experience. I figured an AWS cert may help authenticate my System Design and AWS skills.

The caveat to this is reflected in my Score:

Fifty of the sixty-five questions are scored, but there’s also a degree of scaling involved. The margin was only one or two questions even then!

Preparation#

TutorialsDojo#

I purchased the Online Video Lectures and also the Mock Exam pack.

I trained the course map of Lambda with a few million tokens and then worked through Topic Tests, Review Tests, Section Tests and Timed Tests both on my own and with LambdaMind too.

Anki#

I’ve packaged the deck I built (with λμ) for sale on my bazaar, but I’ve also just thrown it up on AnkiWeb as a regular free shared deck. Lambda Mind is cool because it uses AnkiConnect to create your from within the Chat session.

LambdaMind#

Fundamentally, I’ve created this new Desktop Application called λambda which constructs a model of my Subject knowledge with Claude Code or any other sufficiently intelligent LLM.

I’ve attempted a number of difficult MCQ exams in my Undergraduate and education more generally.

Lambda Mind is a rabbit-hole of it’s own, and I’ll be publishing some YouTube videos explaining how it all works soon.

The product has been engineered to have a look and feel of RStudio. The underlying lambda-agent is open-source and has been built to internalise Spaced Repetition, evidence-based learning pedagogy and anti-plagiarism rules. It’s shipped as an Agentic skill and is ready to be used immediately.

For those in the know, it mimics Eero Alvaar’s ‘How I learn with AI’ system - though that is discussed in more detail on my dedicated site-post.

Scheduling#

The TutorialDojo deck was 1031 pages in 18 sections. Lambda chopped up the workload based on my 15 day constraints:

The clock sums to ~41 hours, but the timing functionality within the App was a little buggy - it is a newish SaaS anyways. I tried to start the timer whenever I did any Deep Work.

The Exam itself.#

I did the exam online, invigilated and scheduled by Pearson OnVue. The process itself went smoothly. Some salient details that may not have been made obvious to anyone taking this exam are:

1. you cannot do the exam in the bathroom
2. you cannot wear gloves in the exam.
3. clear water bottles are allowed.
4. once the exam starts, you cannot leave the room.

This list is far from exhaustive, but the last point caught me with my pants down.

Oh, number 5:

5. You cannot wear a watch during the exam.

4 + 5 = Chaos#

An alarm went off on my watch as soon as the exam started, and I was not allowed to exit the room to turn it off. The Garmin device did not time out after 3 cycles of ring / auto-snooze.

This anecdote is amusing because we managed to pass, but it was perhaps one of the worst exam experiences of my life! No-one’s fault really, except arguably mine own.

What else?#

In the Reddit post I go into sufficient detail regarding the extrapolation of what was learned in TutorialsDojo to the actual exam, but I stress the importance of doing official sample questions if you are able to find them.

Rescheduling#

I personally rescheduled this Exam twice. You can do so only twice, with third change being a cancellation. I didn’t want to cancel, and I also wanted to see how good Lambda actually was, so I put myself through this crucible.

Sane advice would be to do labs and give yourself actual time to become proficient with the AWS suite of Software Solutions.

Rushing the way I did only grants a superficial amount of knowledge that’s unlikely to be available when I’m actually in the AWS Console trying to enable Auto-Scaling for EC2 instances.

The Value Proposition#

Thanks for reading, it’s been a privilege in this attention economy.

Ultimately, my motivation for writing about this has been to highlight that it is possible to pass in 2 weeks, but since then this has somewhat turned into a cautionary tale:

• disable your alarms before exams
• don’t overfit to training questions
• give yourself at least a couple of months to engage with the products you’ll be assessed on – develop realistic mastery, because that’s what the exam will ask.

Lastly, for the pirates amongst you 🏴‍☠️, it may be worth knowing that you can select questions in the Pearson test, and furthermore you can even copy them to the clipboard. Tread carefully.