I was planning to prepare for the OCP Java 21 certification alone. One question changed that plan and started something much bigger than the certification itself.
I was going to study alone
When I decided to prepare for the OCP Java 21 certification, my plan was simple.
Buy the book. Study. Take the exam.
Alone.
I had already spent the previous years studying for certifications that way. Before returning my focus to Java, I had earned seven AWS certifications in 16 months, mostly following my own study plans.
So when I decided it was time to update my Java knowledge and prepare for the OCP Java 21 certification, studying alone felt natural.
Then, during a group mentoring session with Bruno Souza, I mentioned what I was planning to do.
He asked me a very simple question:
“Why don’t you do it as a group?”
That question changed everything.
But I didn’t immediately know what that group would look like, or even if it made sense to create one.
Java already had many great communities. Was there really room for another one?
Were there enough developers interested specifically in preparing for a Java certification?
And even if there were, how could I organize a group around a goal that could take several months to achieve?
I didn’t have the answers yet.
But Bruno’s question had changed the way I was looking at my own goal.
Instead of thinking only about how I would prepare for the certification, I started wondering whether this was a journey that could make more sense if we did it together.
It took me some time to figure out how.
And I definitely didn’t imagine that more than a year later, this idea would become a community of more than 500 Java developers, with weekly meetings in Portuguese and English.
I only knew that the idea was worth trying.
From an idea to a study group
A few weeks later, during another mentoring session, Yugo Sakamoto suggested that I create a Discord server.
I liked the idea immediately.
But, like many ideas, it stayed on my to-do list for a few weeks.
Until one evening after work, I decided to stop planning and start building.
I created the Discord server.
I created my personal blog, ronaldotavares.dev.
I created an email list so I could keep people informed about our meetings.
I published a post on LinkedIn inviting Java developers to join me.
And people started showing up.
At first, the idea was very simple: study consistently and study together.
We chose the OCP Java SE 21 Developer Study Guide by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff as our main resource.
I suggested a pace that anyone working full-time could realistically try to maintain: around 10 pages a day, roughly one Pomodoro of focused reading, five or six days a week.
And every week, we would meet.
We reviewed what we had studied, discussed certification-style questions, opened the IDE when something wasn’t clear, and tried to understand not only which answer was correct, but why.
Little by little, something that had started as my personal certification plan was becoming a study group.
And that study group was becoming part of my own preparation.
Then I failed. Twice.
In July 2025, I took the OCP Java 21 exam for the first time.
I scored 64%.
I needed 68%.
Eight days later, I tried again.
This time, I scored 62%.
I’ve already written an entire article about what those two failures taught me, so I won’t go through all the details again here.
But there was another question I had to deal with that wasn’t really about the exam.
It was about the community.
How could I help other developers prepare for a certification that I hadn’t been able to pass myself?
What credibility did I have to lead a certification study group when I couldn’t achieve the goal yet?
That bothered me.
By that point, this wasn’t just my personal study plan anymore. There were people studying with me, joining the weekly meetings and trusting the community we were building.
And I had failed twice.
But eventually I started looking at it differently.
I didn’t have to pretend that I had all the answers.
I could be honest about where I was in the journey.
I could share what had worked, what hadn’t worked, what I had learned from failing, and, most importantly, I could keep studying with everyone else.
So instead of ending the group after our first cycle, we started again.
I went back to Chapter 1.
And this time, I decided to go much deeper.
The community became part of my preparation
During our second cycle, I decided to create a video in Portuguese for each of the 94 certification topics.
That meant reading the Study Guide again, preparing slides, testing examples and finding a way to explain each topic clearly.
At the same time, I created an English LinkedIn carousel for each topic.
One topic at a time.
One day at a time.
And the weekly meetings continued.
I told more of that story in my previous article, Teaching Java Changed the Way I Learned Java, because teaching all those topics completely changed the way I learned them.
But something else was happening at the same time.
The community was giving me a reason to keep going.
There were meetings to prepare. People were studying. Questions were being asked. New members were joining.
I had created the community because I wanted to help other developers reach the certification.
After failing twice, the community became one of the main reasons I couldn’t give up on reaching it myself.
Giving up no longer felt like an option.
Studying for the certification had created the community.
Now the community had become part of my preparation for the certification.
Then other people started passing
One of the most rewarding moments of this entire journey wasn’t when I passed the exam.
It happened before that.
Thiago Bonfim became the first person from our group to earn the Java 21 certification.
We invited him to a special meeting to talk about his preparation and share what he had learned with everyone else.
That changed something for me.
The goal we had been working toward together was becoming real.
Someone from the group had done it.
Later, George also passed the certification and shared his journey with us in another special meeting.
I was still working toward my own certification.
But seeing them succeed made me genuinely happy.
In fact, the happiness I felt when Thiago and George passed was almost as if I had passed myself.
That’s when I started realizing that the community had become much bigger than my own result.
Learning from people I used to learn about
Something else happened that I could never have imagined when I first thought about studying alone.
We started inviting people from the Java ecosystem to spend time with our community.
In April 2025, we had Jeanne Boyarsky, one of the authors of the Study Guide we were using every day.
Then came Professor Isidro, Elder Moraes, Rafael del Nero, Thiago Bonfim and Bruno Souza.
In 2026, we had Nicolai Parlog, and Professor Isidro joined us again.
Think about how different that was from my original plan.
I had started by thinking I would buy a book and study Java alone.
Now our community was having conversations directly with authors, Java Champions, speakers and people deeply involved in the Java ecosystem.
We could ask questions.
We could hear their experiences.
We could learn directly from people whose books, talks and work we had been learning from.
None of that would have happened if I had studied alone.
From Portuguese to English
By the end of 2025, we had completed our second study cycle.
Then, during my vacation in January 2026, I noticed something interesting.
My network had become much more international.
Developers from other countries were joining our Discord server and asking about the study group.
But there was a problem.
Everything we were doing live was in Portuguese.
So in February, we started our first English study group, while also starting another cycle in Portuguese.
George started helping me with our weekly meetings in both Portuguese and English.
Suddenly, the community that had begun as a small Brazilian study group was becoming an international Java community.
Developers from different countries, different time zones and different backgrounds were now studying toward the same goal.
The language changed.
The time zones changed.
But the idea remained exactly the same:
We don’t have to prepare alone.
500 Java developers
Then the numbers started becoming difficult for me to believe.
100 members.
200 members.
300 members.
400 members.
And eventually, more than 500 Java developers in our Discord community.
Of course, numbers are nice.
But 500 was never the most important part.
Behind that number are people joining weekly meetings after work.
People asking questions.
People opening their IDEs to test something they don’t understand.
People explaining concepts to each other.
People sharing resources.
People preparing for their first Java certification.
People who have worked with Java for years and decided they wanted to understand it more deeply.
And people celebrating when someone finally posts:
PASSED!
That’s the community I wanted to create, even though I didn’t know how to describe it when Bruno first asked me that question.
And then it was finally my turn
On August 21, 2026, after 17 months of studying, teaching, meetings, videos, questions, mock exams and two failed attempts, I took the OCP Java 21 exam again.
This time:
PASSED — 80%.
I’ve already told the story of that day in the other articles in this series.
The DONEEEEEEE!!! I posted in Discord.
Celebrating with my wife and daughter.
And finally telling the community that evening that I had passed.
But looking back now, there is something about that moment that matters even more to me.
I didn’t reach the end of that journey alone.
The same community I had created to help other developers prepare had helped me reach my own goal.
More than 40 days later
It has now been more than 40 days since I earned the certification.
And every week, we still meet.
On Tuesdays, we have our weekly meeting in Portuguese.
On Thursdays, we have our weekly meeting in English.
New developers have joined those meetings since I passed.
Some are at the beginning of their preparation.
Others are already deep into the Study Guide and practice questions.
And now I have the opportunity to help them through the same journey that took me 17 months to complete.
That might be the best evidence that this was never only about my certification.
Passing the exam didn’t end the community.
If anything, it gave me another reason to continue it.
Because now, when someone is struggling with a topic, preparing for a mock exam, wondering whether they are ready or dealing with the frustration of getting questions wrong, I know exactly what that journey can feel like.
I’ve been there.
And we can work through it together.
The question that changed everything
Looking back, it’s incredible how much came from one simple question:
“Why don’t you do it as a group?”
If Bruno hadn’t asked me that question, maybe I would still have earned the certification.
Maybe I would have bought the same book.
Maybe I would have answered the same questions.
Maybe I would have eventually seen PASSED on the screen.
But I would have missed so much of what made these 17 months valuable.
I would have missed the weekly discussions.
The questions I didn’t know how to answer.
The moments when someone said, “What if we change this?”
The opportunity to teach 94 Java topics.
The conversations with people I used to learn about from books and conferences.
The happiness of seeing Thiago and George pass before me.
The friendships.
The hundreds of developers who decided to study together.
I started this journey because I wanted to become a better Java developer and earn a certification.
I achieved both.
But I also got something I wasn’t looking for when I started.
A community.
I started because I didn’t want to study alone.
Today, more than 500 Java developers don’t have to study alone either.
And we’re not done yet.
If you’re preparing for the OCP Java 21 certification, you don’t have to study alone.
We are now more than 500 developers in the Java 21 Certification Study Group, with weekly meetings in Portuguese and English.
Come study with us:
Join the Java 21 Certification Study Group
OCP Java 21 Certification Journey — Article Series
#1 — 1 Java Certification in 17 Months
#2 — How I Would Prepare for the OCP Java 21 Certification Today
#3 — What I Learned From Failing the OCP Java 21 Twice
#4 — Teaching Java Changed the Way I Learned Java
#5 — From Studying Alone to a Community of 500+ Java Developers — You are here.
Let’s Java!!!
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