2018: Day 170 the one where I signed up for 5 more Coursera classes

Dear Reader,

It took me about a month to finish out the last specialization from Google Cloud on Coursera. This week I signed up for 5 more Coursera classes. Another specialization from the Google Cloud team called, “Data Engineering on Google Cloud Platform,” caught my attention. Some of the videos from the, “Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform,” specialization were really pretty good. Based on that and pretty much that alone it seemed like a good idea to jump in and do another 5 courses. That pretty much means that every night before going to bed I’m going to spend an hour or more learning about data science from the Google Cloud team. Maybe it was the idea of thinking about data structures that pulled me into another cycle of learning. Last year I did not do enough professional development. This year I’m off to a good start and we have not reached the halfway mark yet.

Everything on the Coursera website and Android application are pretty easy to use. Throughout the last series of courses I had less time to write every day. This time around I’m going to try to keep producing words and engage in a healthy amount of learning at the same time. Speaking of learning about things. Over the last year I have been sampling a variety of hot sauces. To that end, I had signed up for a Hot One’s subscription box. That monthly subscription includes a service that picks and sends out 3 hot sauces at a time. One of them this time was really beyond my accepted tolerance for spice. It was made by the folks over at Hellfire Hot Sauce and it happens to be called the, “Fiery Fool Hot Sauce.” Normally, I do pretty well with hot foods. The aforementioned sauce is one that I strongly dislike. They were not kidding about it being a very hot sauce. All of The Last Dab sauces had better flavor and were more palatable. The thumbnail associated with this blog post includes all 3 hot sauces that arrived.

I’m not sure how this post went from being about online learning to discussion hot sauces. That is one of the quirks of stream of consciousness writing. Things can change very quickly. Here shortly I’m going to click publish and start learning on Coursera. It is raining outside and the weather is pretty dreary. That is a good recipe for spending some time watching videos about data engineering. One of the things about listening to courses with my Bose Qc35 headphones is that it is very easy to focus in and enjoy the content. Locking in and really focusing on the content is something that is easier to do right before bed when things have slowed down in the house. Historically that time has been reserved for listening to music and writing. Technology is rapidly changing and staying at the cutting edge of things requires being a lifelong learner. To that end my nightly routine has to change a little bit to help me continue learning.

It really is amazing that the Google Cloud team has spent so much time putting together all this content related to machine learning and data engineering. Courses like this open the door to a wide audience to learn and do practice exercises. Working on actual hands on labs and practice exercises really does make a difference and is an amazing addition to traditional lecture style videos. Learning has changed a lot over the last couple of years. Deliver methods that allow for online collaboration and complex lab projects are really changing how learners are able to interact with the material. Throughout the computer science space that type of learning is really changing just how people are able to grow and develop their toolkits. My focus is about to shift to the first course, “Google Cloud Platform Big Data and Machine Learning Fundamentals.” I’m sure the courses will be a major part of my writing efforts over the next 30 days.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado