From TerraQuiz to CertForge

CertForge started with a much smaller goal. I was preparing for the HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification and wanted a better way to practice, so I built a quiz tool for myself. It was called TerraQuiz.

The first commit landed on March 11, 2025. Two days later I had a working backend that used AI to generate Terraform questions, saved them to a database and recorded my results. One of the earliest features shuffled the answer options, because the correct answer should never be something you can memorize by position.

The problem I had was not really about Terraform. Every certification I looked at had the same gap, so in April I rebuilt the front end in Next.js and renamed the project CertForge.

That month added sign-in, a first dashboard, an onboarding survey and, on April 26, the first waitlist preview. It was still rough, but it had stopped being a personal script and started becoming a product.

Generating questions is easy. Generating good ones without repeating yourself is not. In June I added similarity checks to catch near-duplicate questions and started building out AWS alongside Terraform.

July brought multi-select questions, structured explanations and a history of every question you had answered, so practice could stop showing you the same things. By September that history powered mastery tracking, study streaks and the first study recommendations.

The biggest shift came when I stopped treating every topic as equal. Real exams are weighted, and most practice tools ignore that. I rebuilt study around curricula taken from the official exam guides, so progress could be tracked by domain, topic and subtopic.

Exam readiness, a multi-factor mastery score and difficulty that adjusts from how people actually answer all grew out of that change.

This stretch added the pieces that make practice feel like the real thing: a full exam simulator with results review, skill-level mastery, the AI Study Coach, question flags and public certification pages with a comparison tool.

I also built an internal tool called the Forge, which turns an exam guide into a structured curriculum that can be reviewed before any question is written from it. It is why adding a new certification no longer means starting from scratch. In January, a beta sign-up page went up.

A tool for yourself can break. A tool for other people cannot, or at least not as often. These months went into the unglamorous work: beta invite codes, stronger security around every request, a move to infrastructure defined in code on AWS with a separate staging environment, and a validation pipeline that checks questions before they reach anyone.

On April 28, 2026, after more than 1,600 commits and a little over 13 months of building, the beta opened.