New Course: Ultimate Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F)

Anthropic’s Claude ecosystem is moving quickly from “chat with an AI” toward building serious software systems around Claude.

And its Claude Certified Architect – Foundations certification, or CCAR-F, reflects that.

This isn’t an exam built primarily around memorizing terminology. It focuses heavily on the architectural decisions involved in building real applications with Claude: agents, tools, Claude Code, the Claude API, the Agent SDK, Model Context Protocol, prompt engineering, structured output, context management, reliability, and more.

That’s why we’ve created our newest course:

Ultimate Claude Certified Architect – Foundations

For our launch, you can enroll for just $9.99 for the next 5 days:

https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-anthropic-claude-certified-architect-foundations-ccar-f/?couponCode=CCAR-F-LAUNCH

Important: Who can take the CCAR-F exam?

Before we go any further, there’s an important limitation you need to know about.

The Claude Certified Architect – Foundations certification exam is currently only available to people at Anthropic partner organizations.

If you aren’t working with an eligible Anthropic partner, you currently won’t be able to sit for the certification exam.

We want to make that very clear. Don’t buy an exam prep course because you think the CCAR-F certification is generally available when it isn’t.

That said, the material covered by the certification is also a very good roadmap for learning the skills required to build production systems with Claude, so the course may still be useful even if certification isn’t your immediate goal.

Passing CCAR-F is only half the objective

Certification courses can easily turn into long lists of facts to memorize.

We didn’t want to build that course.

The CCAR-F exam itself emphasizes practical judgment about architecture, configuration, and engineering trade-offs. The official exam structure reflected in our course consists of five domains covering Agentic Architecture, Tool Design and MCP, Claude Code, Prompt Engineering, and Context and Reliability.

So our goal is twofold:

First, prepare you to pass the CCAR-F certification exam.

Second, make you better at using Claude as an AI engineer.

Those two objectives reinforce each other.

If you genuinely understand why one agent architecture works better than another, how Claude chooses tools, when to use MCP, how to control Claude Code, how to manage context, and how to build reliable structured outputs, the certification questions become much easier to reason through.

A hands-on Claude engineering course

The course contains roughly 79 lessons across seven sections, with quizzes, labs, and exam preparation woven throughout.

But the most important part isn’t the lesson count.

It’s what you’ll actually do.

The course includes six hands-on labs designed around realistic engineering scenarios.

You’ll build an MCP server and learn how tool descriptions influence Claude’s behavior. You’ll construct multi-agent systems using the Claude Agent SDK. You’ll work with hooks and deterministic controls. You’ll integrate Claude Code with a development workflow. You’ll build structured extraction pipelines with validation and retry logic. And you’ll learn how to manage long-running Claude Code sessions and context effectively.

For example, the MCP lab has you build three tools, deliberately create a tool-routing failure, and then diagnose and correct it.

Another lab builds a coordinator with search, analysis, and synthesis subagents, including parallel execution and preservation of citations across agents.

These aren’t demonstrations you’re expected to watch passively. They’re designed to make the concepts stick.

Learn Claude Code, MCP, agents, prompting, reliability, and more

Among the topics covered are:

Claude API fundamentals

You’ll understand the request and response structure underneath Claude applications, including messages, content blocks, generation controls, tool use, and the agentic loop.

Tool use and Model Context Protocol

Learn how Claude selects and calls tools, how to design tools that are selected reliably, and how MCP provides a standard architecture for connecting Claude to external capabilities.

Agentic architecture

Build agent loops, coordinator/subagent architectures, parallel agents, deterministic hooks, human handoffs, sessions, and adaptive workflows.

Claude Code

Learn how CLAUDE.md, skills, commands, permissions, plan mode, hooks, headless execution, and CI workflows fit together.

Prompt engineering and structured output

Move beyond vague prompting toward explicit criteria, reliable schemas, validation, retries, confidence scoring, and scalable review architectures.

Context and reliability

Treat the context window as an engineering constraint, handle compaction and long sessions, propagate failures properly, preserve provenance, and decide when a human needs to get involved.

The final portion of the course concentrates on exam readiness, including scenario analysis, understanding how exam questions are constructed, recognizing distractors, and reviewing the concepts behind each exam domain.

Quizzes and full-length CCAR-F practice exams

Every major section includes exam-style quiz questions designed to reinforce the concepts you’ve just learned.

You’ll also get two realistic full-length CCAR-F practice exams, built to help you find weak areas before the real certification exam.

Each practice exam includes detailed answer explanations.

That’s important to us.

A practice exam shouldn’t just tell you that you got a question wrong. It should help you understand why the right answer is right, why the distractors are wrong, and what principle you should remember when you encounter a similar situation again.

In other words, the practice tests aren’t just assessments. They’re part of the course.

Meet your instructors

Puria Izady

Puria Izady is the lead instructor for Ultimate Claude Certified Architect – Foundations.

Puria is a Solutions Architect at AWS specializing in Generative AI and Machine Learning, and is the creator behind Pumping Code.

He brings the hands-on engineering perspective that a course like this needs, particularly when the certification itself is so heavily focused on practical architecture and implementation.

Frank Kane

I’m Frank Kane, and I’ve taught AI and machine learning to more than 1.2 million people around the world.

I hold 26 patents in machine learning and spent 9 years at Amazon as a senior engineer and senior manager.

I’ve spent many years developing technical certification courses and practice exams, and my role here is to help turn all of this material into something you can learn efficiently and apply both on the exam and afterward.

Launch special: $9.99 for 5 days

Because this course is brand new, we’re launching it with a special introductory price.

For the next 5 days, you can enroll in Ultimate Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) for $9.99:

https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-anthropic-claude-certified-architect-foundations-ccar-f/?couponCode=CCAR-F-LAUNCH

If you’re preparing for the Anthropic Claude Certified Architect – Foundations certification, we hope the course helps you walk into the exam with confidence.

But we also hope it does something more lasting.

We want you to finish the course understanding how to design better agents, build better Claude integrations, use Claude Code more effectively, and make better architectural decisions when putting AI systems into production.

And if you do take the course, please leave us an honest review after you’ve had a chance to work through it. Reviews and feedback are especially important when a course is brand new, and they help us figure out what we should improve next.

Thank you for having us along on your learning journey!

Frank Kane & Puria Izady

Our New Online Community: The AI Engineering Guild

If you work with AI all day, you’re probably ready to talk with some humans for a change! I’ve partnered with Udemy to launch an online community for AI professionals: The AI Engineering Guild.

“Social learning” is all the rage – turns out people want to learn with other people! As a Guild member, you’ll gain access to:

  • Bi-weekly office hours with Frank Kane
  • Monthly build challenges to strengthen your portfolio and expertise
  • A supportive group of fellow AI professionals
  • The latest AI news and what it means for you

This isn’t some crazy-expensive cohort or bootcamp thing, though. It’s much lower-key, and lower-priced. Membership is $19/month, and you get a 7 day free trial so you can see if it’s right for you first.

I hope to welcome you to the guild!

New Course: Ultimate Anthropic Claude Certified Associate Foundations CCAO-F Prep

Claude is becoming a serious productivity tool for modern professionals. But using Claude well, especially in a business setting, takes more than writing a quick prompt and accepting the first answer.

Anthropic’s Claude Certified Associate – Foundations CCAO-F certification is designed to validate that you can use Claude effectively and responsibly in real-world business and productivity workflows. That includes prompting, output evaluation, product and model selection, workflow design, Projects, knowledge management, responsible AI, and troubleshooting.

I’ve teamed up again with top instructor Puria Izady on a new course: Ultimate Anthropic Claude Certified Associate Foundations Prep, to help you prepare for that exam with confidence.

For the next 5 days only, you can enroll for $9.99 here:

https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-anthropic-claude-certified-associate-foundations-ccao-f/?couponCode=CCAO-F-LAUNCH

Note: this certification is currently only available to Anthropic partner organizations.

What this course helps you do

The course is focused on the real outcome learners care about: being ready for the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam (CCAO-F).

By the end of the course, you should have a clear understanding of the exam blueprint, the judgment tested by scenario questions, and the practical Claude skills expected of an Associate-level candidate.

You will learn how to:

  • Create effective prompts for business and productivity tasks
  • Break complex requests into manageable steps
  • Choose the right Claude features, including chat, Projects, Artifacts, Research, Skills, Memory, and Code Execution
  • Select models based on cost, speed, quality, and task complexity
  • Evaluate Claude outputs for accuracy, completeness, hallucinations, inconsistency, bias, and audience fit
  • Apply validation techniques such as source-checking, spot-checking, grounding, and human review
  • Configure Projects with useful instructions, knowledge sources, and connectors
  • Handle data sensitivity, privacy, governance, responsible use, and escalation
  • Diagnose and repair poor results from underperforming prompts or workflows
  • Approach exam questions by identifying the key constraint and choosing the most appropriate action

Built around the official exam blueprint

The course follows the official CCAO-F exam domains:

  • Prompting and Task Execution
  • Output Evaluation and Validation
  • Product and Model Selection
  • Workflow Integration and Solution Design
  • Configuration and Knowledge Management
  • Governance, Risk, and Responsible Use
  • Troubleshooting and Optimization

The exam is scenario-driven, so the course is scenario-driven too. The point is not to memorize definitions. The point is to learn how to make the right call when the exam asks what you should do next.

Includes two full-length practice exams

Practice is a major part of the course.

The course includes:

  • Exam-style quizzes for every domain
  • Two full-length 60-question practice exams
  • Detailed explanations for every correct answer
  • Rationales explaining why the wrong answers are wrong
  • Question styles that mirror the real exam format, including multiple-choice and multiple-response items

That is important because the CCAO-F exam is not just testing whether you know what Claude features exist. It is testing whether you can apply them appropriately in realistic workplace situations.

Who this course is for

This course is intended for professionals who use Claude as a productivity tool in roles such as:

  • Operations
  • Marketing
  • Project management
  • Education
  • Communications
  • HR
  • Consulting
  • Business analysis
  • General knowledge work

No programming, API, or machine learning experience is required. This is not a developer course, and it does not teach you to build Claude API applications or agentic systems. It is focused on the Associate-level certification and the practical use of Claude in business workflows.

Why take this course?

If you are already using Claude at work, this course will help you use it more deliberately, more safely, and more effectively.

If you are preparing for the certification exam, it gives you a structured, blueprint-aligned path through the material, with enough practice to identify weak areas before exam day.

No course can guarantee a passing result. But this course gives you the coverage, practice, and exam-style decision-making framework you need to prepare seriously.

For the next 5 days only, you can enroll for $9.99 here:

https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-anthropic-claude-certified-associate-foundations-ccao-f/?couponCode=CCAO-F-LAUNCH

Move Beyond Chatbots: Build Production-Ready AI Agents with Claude Managed Agents

Developers who can build reliable AI agents will create applications that go far beyond ordinary chatbots and prompting interfaces.

A chatbot responds to a message. A more capable agent can use tools, interact with external systems, retain information, evaluate its own work, and continue taking action until it reaches a defined goal.

Learning to build those systems is the focus of our new course:

Claude Managed Agents: In Depth and Hands On!

I created this course with Puria Izady of Pumping Code to give developers a practical path from basic agent concepts to complete, integrated agentic applications – using Anthropic’s new Claude Managed Agents system that lets you run your applications entirely in the cloud.

Course logo with Frank & Puria

The course is now available on Udemy. For a limited time, you can enroll for $9.99 using the following coupon:

https://www.udemy.com/course/claude-managed-agents/?couponCode=CLAUDE-AGENTS

Introductory pricing expires July 25, 2026.

Why agent development is becoming an important skill

Most developers have already experimented with large language models. They have written prompts, used a chat interface, or called a model API.

Those are useful starting points, but they do not address many of the difficult questions involved in building a real application:

  • How does the model safely interact with tools?
  • Where does the agent run?
  • How do you monitor what it is doing?
  • What state persists between interactions?
  • How does it authenticate with external services?
  • How do you prevent destructive or unauthorized actions?
  • How can an agent determine whether it has actually completed its task?
  • When should you use one agent, and when should you coordinate several?
  • How do you control latency and cost in production?

These are software-engineering and system-design problems, not just prompting problems.

Claude Managed Agents provide a managed environment for addressing many of them. The platform brings together agents, cloud environments, sessions, events, tools, integrations, outcomes, and memory within a common architecture.

Our course teaches you how those components work and, more importantly, how to use them yourself.

What you will be able to build

By the end of the course, you will be able to design Claude agents that operate in cloud environments, use tools, connect to external services, retain useful information, and work toward clearly defined outcomes.

You will learn how to:

Design effective agents

You will configure agents using appropriate Claude models, focused system prompts, built-in tools, tool overrides, and versioning.

We also examine how to keep prompts and tool results concise so the agent receives the information it needs without wasting tokens or increasing costs unnecessarily.

Create and secure cloud environments

Managed agents run in cloud containers. You will learn how to configure these environments, install the packages your application needs, control network access, reuse environments, and apply least-privilege principles.

Understand what an agent is doing

An agent may perform many actions during a single run. You need visibility into those actions if you intend to build a reliable application.

The course shows you how to work with the event stream to observe messages, tool calls, progress, interruptions, state changes, usage, and cost.

Connect agents to tools and external services

Useful agents rarely operate in isolation.

You will learn when to use built-in tools, custom tools, or Model Context Protocol integrations. You will also work with MCP servers, vaults, OAuth credentials, and per-user authentication.

Add safety controls

Giving an agent access to tools creates new risks.

The course covers permission policies, confirmation flows, restricted networking, prompt-injection threats, vault scoping, memory protection, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.

These controls allow you to balance useful autonomy against the need for oversight.

Use Skills and files

You will learn how to attach Anthropic’s document and spreadsheet Skills, create your own reusable Skills, mount files into sessions, and retrieve generated deliverables.

You will also see how agents can work with GitHub repositories and participate in development workflows.

Build agents that work toward outcomes

Many agent applications need something more precise than an open-ended conversation.

Claude Managed Agents can work toward a declared outcome and evaluate their work against a rubric. You will learn how to define what “done” means, interpret evaluation results, and allow an agent to revise its work until it satisfies the stated requirements.

Give agents persistent memory

A useful long-running agent may need information that extends beyond one context window or session.

You will build agents that store and retrieve relevant information over time while also considering versioning, read-only access, audit trails, and memory-poisoning risks.

Orchestrate multiple agents

Not every task should be assigned to a single general-purpose agent.

The course shows you how to coordinate agents with specialized responsibilities. One agent might conduct research, another might draft a report, and another might verify its accuracy.

You will learn when this approach is useful, when it adds unnecessary complexity, and how to route events and approvals within a multi-agent workflow.

Integrate agents into production systems

We also cover files, GitHub workflows, event streaming, webhooks, signature verification, idempotency, Slack notifications, model routing, and cost management.

The goal is to help you understand the larger system around the model, not just the model itself.

Fifteen hands-on labs

This is not a course built entirely around slides and conceptual demonstrations.

It contains 15 hands-on labs in which you build increasingly capable agents and supporting systems.

Among other projects, you will build:

  • Your first managed agent using the Console
  • A Python version of the agent using the SDK
  • A research agent connected to Google Docs through MCP
  • A reusable data-science environment
  • A streaming console that displays tool use and running cost
  • An agent that works with Linear through MCP
  • A human approval checkpoint for potentially destructive commands
  • A financial-analysis agent that generates spreadsheet deliverables
  • An outcome-driven financial model generator
  • A customer-support agent with persistent memory
  • A multi-agent research, writing, and fact-checking pipeline
  • An agent that edits code and opens a GitHub pull request
  • A webhook integration that sends Slack notifications

Each lab introduces capabilities that feed into the final project.

The capstone: a personal research agent

The course concludes with a complete personal research-agent project.

This system brings together the major concepts from the course:

  • Multiple coordinated agents
  • Carefully designed system prompts
  • A configured cloud environment
  • MCP integrations and authenticated vaults
  • Outcome evaluation
  • Persistent memory
  • Streaming progress
  • Google Docs output
  • Slack notifications
  • Cost and scalability analysis

The result is not merely a chatbot that summarizes a prompt. It is an integrated agentic workflow designed to perform a useful task from beginning to end.

A foundation for Anthropic Claude certifications

The course is also relevant to learners building a broader learning path toward Anthropic Claude certifications.

It is not positioned as a collection of exam questions or a shortcut around the required knowledge. Instead, it gives you practical experience with many of the architectural and development concepts that Claude practitioners should understand.

That hands-on context can make certification material more concrete and useful.

Who should take this course?

The course is intended for:

  • Software developers
  • AI and machine-learning engineers
  • Solutions architects
  • Technical founders
  • Cloud engineers
  • Claude Code users
  • Developers preparing to build agent-powered products
  • Learners pursuing deeper expertise in the Anthropic ecosystem

You do not need previous experience with Claude Managed Agents. Some Python experience will be useful for the coding labs, but the course begins with the platform’s core concepts and setup process.

We also explain the different learning paths available to Python developers and Claude Code users.

About the instructors

Frank Kane

I have taught AI, machine learning, data engineering, and cloud computing to more than 1.2 million learners around the world.

I hold 26 patents in machine learning and spent nine years at Amazon as a senior engineer and senior manager.

My focus in this course is helping you understand the architecture behind managed agents and translating that architecture into practical development skills.

Puria Izady

Puria Izady is a former AWS Solutions Architect specializing in Generative AI and Machine Learning.

He is the creator of Pumping Code, where he teaches practical software and AI development, and the creator of Cocoduro, an agentic grocery solution.

Puria brings direct experience designing modern AI and cloud architectures and turning emerging AI capabilities into working applications.

Start building practical Claude agents

AI agents are becoming a major new layer of software development.

But there is a substantial difference between demonstrating an agent and building one that is observable, secure, integrated, cost-conscious, and capable of producing a reliable result.

Claude Managed Agents: In Depth and Hands On! is designed to help you close that gap.

For a limited time, enroll for $9.99 using the coupon below:

https://www.udemy.com/course/claude-managed-agents/?couponCode=CLAUDE-AGENTS

The introductory offer expires on July 25, 2026.

We hope to see you in the course.

New Practice Exams for Anthropic’s New Claude Certs!

Thanks to those who enrolled in our practice exams for the Claude Certified Architect Foundations certification! We’ve received a lot of positive feedback on those exams, and hear regularly on LinkedIn from people who passed using them as a resource.

You may have heard Anthropic just released three additional certifications for Claude! I’m excited to announce we’ve launched 3-packs of practice exams for each, created with even higher standards than before. Every question is grounded in the official exam guides, official Anthropic documentation, and is thoroughly fact-checked and validated to match the complexity and style of the real exam.

Grab ’em now for $9.99 each, or your local equivalent! Offer valid only for a few days, so if you plan on taking these exams in the future, now’s the time to snatch them up. Use the links below, or coupon code NEWCERTS. If you’re reading this later, don’t worry – Udemy will still offer you a great price.

CLAUDE CERTIFIED ASSOCIATE – FOUNDATIONS PRACTICE EXAM PACK (CCAO-F)

CCAO-F logo

This is Anthropic’s new entry-level certification, aimed at a general audience and not just developers.

CLAUDE CERTIFIED ARCHITECT – PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE EXAM PACK (CCAR-P)

CCAR-P logo

Your natural next step! The professional-level certification of the associate-level one you’ve already prepared for.

CLAUDE CERTIFIED DEVELOPER – FOUNDATIONS PRACTICE EXAM PACK (CCDV-F)

CCDV-F logo

A developer-focused certification that proves you know how to build real-world applications on the Anthropic stack.

These are brand-new practice tests for brand-new certifications, and your early feedback is very important to us! Please feel free to use the Q&A feature if you have feedback on specific questions, and your early reviews are VERY important to us.

As always, thank you for having me along on your learning journey!

-Frank Kane
Sundog Education

Practice Exam Bonanza!

We’ve just released a TON of new practice exams for AWS and Anthropic certifications! If you’re planning to sit for any of these exams, go grab ’em while you can! All exclusively on Udemy:

Anthropic Claude Certified Architect Foundations – Practice Exam 6-Pack

CCA practice exam logo

We’ve added 3 new exams to our top-selling Claude practice exam set, for the hottest AI certification out there.

We’ve also released a ton of new AWS certification practice tests; each one is meticulously reviewed to ensure the technical accuracy of every question, and to ensure a realistic simulation of the complexity and level of difficulty you can expect on the real thing:

AWS Certified Generative AI Developer Professional – Practice Exam 3-Pack

And check out its companion prep course for the AIP-C01 exam!

AWS Certified AI Practitioner – Practice Exam 3-Pack

We also have a prep course for AIF-C01 that makes the perfect pair!

AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate – Practice Exam 3-Pack

It too has a companion course for DEA-C01 available. And last but not least:

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate – Practice Exam 3-Pack

You guessed it… there’s a prep course for MLA-C01 as well!

We want you to be as prepared as possible as you sit for these challenging, yet valuable exams. These certifications establish you as having the skills needed in the AI era – not just with generative AI, but also developing with AI, and the fundamentals of data engineering and machine learning that underpin it all. I hope you find these new practice exam resources helpful!

 

 

New Course: AI Foundations – The Fundamentals: Understanding Modern AI

AI is suddenly showing up everywhere: at work, in the news, in productivity tools, and in everyday conversations. A lot of people have tried tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini by now, but still do not really understand what is happening under the hood.

That is understandable. AI can feel almost magical one minute, and frustratingly unreliable the next.

That is why I am excited to announce a new course from Sundog Education:

AI Foundations – The Fundamentals: Understanding Modern AI

I co-instructed this course with Károly Nyisztor. The goal is simple: explain modern AI in a way that is clear, practical, and useful, without assuming you are a programmer or AI engineer.

This is not a course about building AI systems. It is a course about understanding them.

What the Course Covers

In this course, you will learn:

  • What “AI” really means in practical terms
  • How tools like ChatGPT and Claude work at a high level
  • What large language models, tokens, parameters, context windows, and temperature actually mean
  • Why AI can sound smart while still being confidently wrong
  • How to separate real AI capabilities from hype and marketing
  • Where AI is useful, and where you should be careful
  • How to use AI for writing, research, learning, planning, brainstorming, and productivity
  • How to choose between tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek, and others

No coding experience is required. No machine learning background is assumed.

If you have used ChatGPT a few times but still feel like the basic concepts are murky, this course is for you. It is also a good course to share with colleagues, managers, friends, or family members who want to understand AI without becoming engineers.

About Károly

Your main instructor is Károly Nyisztor, a software engineer, instructor, and author with over 30 years of experience. He has taught more than 400,000 students worldwide, holds 12 patents in software architecture and mobile computing, and has worked with companies including Siemens, SAP, and Apple.

So while the course is beginner-friendly, it is still grounded in a lot of real technical experience.

Launch Offer

To celebrate the launch, the course is available for just $9.99 for the next 5 days.

[Enroll in AI Foundations for $9.99]

AI is not going away, and understanding the basics is quickly becoming an important skill for just about everyone. This course is a practical way to build that foundation without getting buried in jargon.

I hope to see you there!

[Click here to enroll for $9.99]

Introducing 1:1 Coaching with Frank Kane

I’ve spent the last decade teaching over 1.1 million students how to build skills in AI, machine learning, data engineering, and more. It’s been incredibly rewarding – but over the years, I’ve noticed something. The questions that matter most to people aren’t always technical ones.

They’re questions like:

“AI is reshaping my entire industry. How do I make sure I’m not left behind?”

“I just got promoted to engineering manager and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“I’ve applied to Amazon three times and keep getting rejected. What am I doing wrong?”

“I’ve been in the same role for five years and I feel stuck.”

These are real questions I hear from students all the time – and they’re not the kind of thing a video course can fully answer. They need a real conversation, with someone who’s been there and can give you honest, specific advice tailored to your situation.

So I’m doing something new: I’m now offering private 1:1 coaching sessions.

What coaching covers

This isn’t technical consulting – I’m not going to debug your Spark job or review your Terraform config. This is coaching: strategic, career-focused conversations about the decisions that shape your professional life.

Here are some of the things we can work through together:

Navigating AI’s impact on your career. The workplace is changing fast. I can help you think clearly about what AI actually means for your role, your industry, and your next move – without the hype or the panic.

Becoming a better manager. I spent 9 years as a senior manager at Amazon, where I was consistently rated “top tier.” I led large technical teams, managed complex projects, and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. If you’re new to management – or struggling with a team that’s not performing – I can help.

Landing a job at a top tech company. As an Amazon “bar raiser,” I interviewed over a thousand candidates and hired hundreds. I know exactly what these companies are looking for in interviews, and I can tell you what’s working and what’s not in your approach.

Figuring out your next career move. Sometimes you just need to talk through your options with someone who has no agenda other than helping you make the best decision. Whether you’re considering a promotion, a pivot, or starting something of your own, I’m happy to be that sounding board.

Building an online course business. I built Sundog Education from scratch into a company that’s reached over a million students. If you’re thinking about creating and selling courses, I can share what I’ve learned about content, platforms, pricing, and growing an audience.

How it works

It’s simple. You book a time, we meet, and you bring whatever’s on your mind. No curriculum, no slides – just a focused conversation where I give you my full attention and my honest perspective.

I’m offering two session lengths at introductory pricing:

  • 30-minute focused session – $100. Great for a specific question, a quick gut-check on a decision, or targeted interview prep.
  • 60-minute deep dive – $200. Best for working through bigger challenges like career transitions, management issues, or building a longer-term strategy.

These introductory rates won’t last forever, so if you’ve been wanting to pick my brain – now’s the time.

Book a session

I’ve put together a page with more details on who this is for and what to expect:

Learn more and book a session →

If you’ve ever wished you could just ask me something directly – now you can. I’m looking forward to it.

– Frank

Practice Tests for Claude Certified Architect Certification

There’s a lot of buzz about the Anthropic Claude Certified Architect – Foundation certification! This marks Anthropic’s entry into the certification space, and given their growing dominance in enterprise AI – it’s an important one.

They’ve made a lot of resources available for free to prepare for this certification, and that should be your starting point. Definitely study the exam guide and free courses they are hosting at SkillJar. As of this writing, the exam itself is only offered to their partner organizations, but very soon it will open up to the general public for just $99.

Once you’ve consumed that knowledge, that’s where we come in. Our set of three full-length practice exams for CCA certification are based tightly on the exam guide and courses the certification is based on. Just like the real thing, every question is scenario-based, and each practice exam randomly chooses 4 of 6 scenarios to focus on.

As is befitting, we used AI agents to ensure the quality of these practice exams. Every question is checked for accuracy, adherence to the exam guide, ensuring the answer isn’t hinted at in the question, ensuring each answer choice is of similar complexity, ensuring the complexity is consistent with Anthropic’s official practice questions… in all, eleven different criteria are checked.

This is NOT an easy certification (they describe it as “301-level.”) It tests very specific best practices and knowledge of specific anti-patterns in their own training material, and they’re not necessarily common-sense things you could just guess on your own. Even if you are an experienced AI engineer, preparation for this exam is essential.

They’re available exclusively at Udemy. Go get our practice exams for Claude Certified Architect! And good luck on the exam!

New AWS Certified GenAI Developer Pro Prep Resources!

Become an AWS GenAI Developer Pro: Complete Training + 3 Full Practice Exams

If you want to build real generative AI applications on AWS and prepare confidently for the AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIP-C01) exam, I’ve put together two comprehensive resources to help you get there: a full 23-hour training course and a pack of six realistic practice exams.

Below are direct links to both, with your Udemy promotional pricing:

Whether you’re upskilling for work, preparing for certification, or diving deeper into AWS Bedrock and agentic AI, these two resources work together to give you both hands-on skills and exam-ready confidence.

Ultimate AWS Generative AI Developer – Professional (AIPC01) Prep Course

Co-produced with bestselling AWS instructor Stéphane Maarek

The prep course is a complete, structured path through everything the AIPC01 exam expects you to know. You’ll learn how to architect, build, evaluate, and optimize generative AI systems on AWS in a practical, real-world way.

The course includes:

  • 22 hours of HD video content
  • 50+ hands-on labs and exercises
  • A full-length 75-question practice exam
  • Downloadable PDF study guides and slide decks
  • Clear coverage of every domain and skill in the exam guide

You’ll get deep, practical experience with AWS Bedrock, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI workflows, Prompt Flows, Evaluations, Data Automation, SageMaker integration, orchestration patterns, security, and more.

Enroll in the prep course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-aws-certified-generative-ai-developer-professional/?couponCode=GENAI-PRO-LAUNCH


AWS GenAI Developer Pro AIP-C01 – Three Full Practice Exams

225 exam-style questions across 3 complete tests

To find out whether you’re truly ready for the Professional-level exam, these three practice tests simulate the real thing as closely as possible.

Each exam includes:

  • 75 scenario-based questions
  • Accurate domain weighting
  • Realistic difficulty and depth
  • Professional-level reasoning and architectural thinking

Every question comes with a fully detailed explanation — not just for the correct answer, but for all incorrect ones as well — so you can understand the logic behind every choice.

These exams help you identify strengths, uncover knowledge gaps, and walk into the real test with confidence.

Take the practice exams:

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-generative-ai-developer-pro-practice-exam-pack-2026/?referralCode=BBAAF501E08A5369C8CC


Why These Two Resources Work Together

The AIP-C01 exam doesn’t test memorization — it tests real GenAI engineering skills, architectural judgment, and your ability to reason through complex AWS scenarios.

By combining:

  • A full 22-hour instructional course
  • 50+ hands-on GenAI labs
  • A complete course practice exam
  • PDF slides and study guides
  • Three additional full-length practice exams
  • 225 detailed, fully explained questions

…you get a complete learning and practice system designed to help you succeed.


Quick Links (In Case You Skipped Ahead)


Thanks for reading, and good luck on your journey toward AWS’s Generative AI Developer Professional certification. If you take the course or the practice exams, I’d love to hear how they help you — and how you perform on exam day.