Settling in

Have been getting a little behind with things lately as the added complication of moving house means I don't have my computer with me yet, so everything is being done either at work or on my laptop. In the Databases course there were 6 seperate assignments to do for today, thankfully its been a quiet week at work and I got all the exercises done there (as it would have been very frustrating to try to do them with one small screen) and then earlier today I went over the other two sebjects that just had quizzes to do, and got those sorted. Things calm down from this point apparently, and certainly I only have one assignment due next weekend, so thats a significant drop!

In C# I completed my hangman game, and was given a task of making a calculator which was certainly not seeming hugely complex in the time I put into it (about half an hour or so, and had all the buttons laid out, the interface displaying and addition calculations working, and the concept for all the rest). I've installed VS express onto my work computer so now I can do stuff there if I am bored, but it feels odd to be doing it there, which is strange as watching the database videos doesn't - I think its that its not overly strange for me to be watching a video or fiddling with a webpage, but programming in visual studio is not really in my standard job description - plus I feel it looks like I'm doing really basic stuff, which is hardly suprising given I am, but it still makes me feel a bit bad.

There is rumour of someone at work doing some programming training. This sounds very interesting. Teho has suggested I ask Alex to give me some tutoring as he reckons Alex would enjoy teaching someone. I'm a little nervous of the prospect, though it would really be nice to get some one to one teaching that ran at my speed.

I've signed up to do another course that Stamford are running on Human-Computer Interaction which starts in January. I was considering the CompSci 101, but watching the video it looks a little too basic for me, though I guess I could go along with it anyway to round off anything I don't know and to get the little statement at the end. Hmm, maybe. By then I'll have finished both my current courses so should have the time.

At work I'm involved in a project to change around quite a big part of the renewals process, which looks very interesting and its nice that Angus trusts me to make sure it works as it should. Next week is Down Tools Week and apparently one of the guys is supposed to be making a tool similar in function to my calculator for co-terming, but better done and built to intergrate with the CRM, which is way beyond my skill level. Simon says he is keen for me to be involved with this, which should be interesting - I wanted to get involved with a DTW project but didn't know how I could be of use to anyone, but this has potential :)

I'm still moving things over from my old flat to my new house. So far sharing seems to be working out well, and I think it will only get better once we have more than just our bedrooms furnished. Much easier to be social when we have a properly equipped lounge. I plan to get the sofas later this week, and TV etc tomorrow, so things will be rather more comfy here by next weekend.

My (ex) father in law brought down some stuff that had been left at my mother in laws house today, including my wedding dress. It was very tempting to put it on and flounce around in it all day.

Developments

Well, I got the other assignment completed relatively swiftly - this was looking at modify statements, so it was more awkward to try to feel my way through the problem (only one was complex, the other was very simple) due to the way the assessment software is designed, but I got there. I've found the next section is based off some videos that have been brought forward in the running schedule from last time, so its new work for me. I've now watched 3 out of 5 of the videos, and done one of the quizzes (out of 3 that are due in this weekend, though I want to go through it again as I only scored 6 out of 8). This weekend is the mid term exam, but its only covering up to what I am working on now, so I shouldn't have to work overly hard, though a review before sitting the test may be wise.

Regarding the C#, we started working with GUI functions last week, which went well. I remain unconvinced about the technical skill of the teacher, given she was telling me I would need some ghastly combination of Ifs and loops to work with 3 non-exclusive checkboxes, when in fact all I required was a simple XOR on each one to reverse its value. I dread to think how long the coding would have taken had I tried to work it with loops rather than thinking 'surely there is an easier way' and hitting google. She freely admits to basically having no time for this course and finding exercises for us online, so its not exactly filling me with confidence.

I've been watching a few videos on MDX and DAX from talks that were done at various SQL Bits events, which have been very informative and have actually given me a much clearer idea of what the languages actually do. I've still got a lot to learn, but I think now I know what value there really is to learning it, and have come concept of what the two each do, and why there are two of them, when they do very similar things.

In other news, things are going to be even busier for me soon, as to add to all this learning I am now moving house too. By this time next month everything should be done, but for now things are going to be a bit manic. Not the best time for the hassle, to be fair, but what can you do.

Oh, and I gave up on the wheat thing. I put on weight, rather than lost it, and didn't feel any different. I also concluded I rather like an awful lot of wheat products so it would have had to do something pretty damn amazing, and it wasn't.

Databases giving me headaches

Today I devoted most of my afternoon to doing a set of exercises for the databases course I am doing. They were rather complicated, but I got there in the end. I learned a valuable lesson - when its been over a month since you watched the instructional videos, its a good idea to review them if you get utterly stuck doing the assessments. I think its still good to try without reviewing the videos, as then its showing the information has actually stuck in your brain, but don't bother wasting absolutely ages before giving in. 


As you may have guessed, I spent ages trying to figure it out. After watching the videos again, and being reminded of techniques I had totally forgotten, it all became much easier. Still a little painful on my brain, but actually doable, which has got to be an improvement. Tomorrow I plan to try the second set of exercises, and hopefully they will be less confusing now I have the hang of getting the queries right in the first place.


I'm not as far ahead with the course as I was before - these exercises are due in this Sunday, whereas before I was over a week ahead. I may have a go at the quizzes due in the week after and see if I can get through those this week too, while I have some quiet time. 


I still haven't looked at arrays in C#. I need to get that figured out before my next class on Wednesday, though I am doubtful that the others in the class will have got them down with no help from the tutor at all. Still, I like being ahead, and that's liable to change anyway as we move into programming using the GUI so anything I can do would probably be wise.

A proper update

OK, so, its been a while, things have been busy.


My holiday was great, nice break away from it all, even if it did rain. But, the intention of this blog is not to be about my personal life.


The night before I went on holiday I was supposed to be at my C# course. I carefully booked my holiday in order to avoid missing any classes. Typically, we had a SQL Server event on that very night, being held in my office (where I actually hadn't been that day, as I had it booked as holiday), and, following discussion with the tutor, I decided my time would be better served there. Which I think it was, there were talks from a couple of very interesting people on the subject of Business Intelligence and Visualisation of data, and it was a chance to meet other people. I do really need to work on my networking skills, but I am hoping this will improve as I gain more knowledge and feel less utterly out of my depth, and it would also be a big plus to actually get an official job change, as having people ask what you do and feeling you ought to say customer service is a little weird at these kinds of meetings.


After getting back from holiday I had my next class in C#, where we worked on If, Else If and Switch statements, which was all pretty simple. I got through all the exercises given just before the end of class, so that felt pretty good.


At work, I got to team up with Noemi and Irma (the BI people at Red Gate) to develop an excel based dashboard for a marketing project that is currently running - Noemi guiding me and Irma along, as Irma only started that week. It was really nice having someone else to work with, though I am not sure how much Irma felt I was more about the design side, as she kept pulling in the data and then letting me tidy up, and while she does certainly have more knowledge for some parts of that than I do, I did feel a little like she didn't think I'd know what to do with the SQL Server parts. Ah well, its equally plausible that shes just not comfortably herself with the design parts, as she did seem to struggle with it when we were working together on it. No point dwelling, ti was still a really good experience, and one I don't think is finished yet either!


Noemi also had a chat with me about possible routes for me to take, career wise, as she certainly feels I have good potential in the Data direction. There is a vague plan in Red Gate to have Data Analysts attached to each division to provide more immediate and agile information delivery, and she thinks this would be a good place for me to start (hence being involved in this dashboard as that's the sort of thing that would be common). This sounds like a very positive start to me, and I enjoy data visualisation - I really want to try to get to a point where I can create webpages (potentially within sharepoint) such that there is the full combination of interactive visuals with easily updatable background data, all simple to access. Noemi gave me and Irma a book to read through which covers a lot of the stuff that will be useful for this, and one thing is certain - I'm going to need to learn more coding. I'm glad I've got started with C#, but its looking like getting some understanding of Flash and Javascript will go a long way too. So, even more things to add to my list.


Then on to week 4 of the C# course, where we did loops, which were simple, and then moved onto Arrays, which have proved a bit more complex, and I need to put some time into trying to understand them better. In the next lesson we should be going on to programming using the GUI, which will be good, as its one thing that is totally outside my experience so learning how all that works will actually be new stuff. I am looking forward to it.


Interspersed with all this, the Stamford online course Introduction to Databases has been going on, and so far I've been able to complete all the exercises and get all the questions right. On Thursday I just started a new set which was distinctly more complicated and I think I need to watch through the videos again to work out how to approach the problems, but I remain confident I will get there. I have a week before those assignments are due, but I'd like to try to get through them in the early part of this week - I've currently done half the assignments due for next Sunday, but the other two are distinctly harder - I breezed through the first ones - so I need to get a move on. I'd say its going well though, there were some questions in the exercises that were marked very difficult, but I still managed to get my head around them.


So all in all things have been pretty busy. Jenna is away for three weeks, so at work I have a fair bit of time to devote to learning stuff without having any extra things thrown at me (now that the dashboard is done) which is fortunate, as when I get home I really don't tend to be in the mood.


One small personal life thing I will mention, as I want to have it recorded and I'll give updates as to how things are going, I've decided to try cutting wheat out of my diet for a month or so. So far its been 2 days and I've not really noticed it much, aside from having to resist cake in the canteen. I've been out today and got supplies to make some meals from so I can have something to eat when I get home in the evenings (and at weekends, of course) and plan to make a chicken risotto and some chicken fajitas, though I can't find any wheat free tortillas so that will probably have to be eaten with potato or rice instead. I'm hoping it will help me lose weight and have more energy, but I'm fairly sceptical, so we shall see.

Whoops

Lots has happened. Been busy. Will write more soon.

C# Course - day 1

So last night was the first lesson of my C# programming course. So far, so simple, everything has been very basic and I've been cheerfully playing around with the stuff we have been given to do so I can investigate how stuff works. Slightly depressingly the teacher and I spent a little while together remembering how the increment and decrement operators work as she couldn't remember, and she seems a little vague generally on how things work - when asked about stuff thats not exactly what shes teaching shes not too sure about the answers - which isn't overly encouraging. Its only lesson one though, so we will see how things move along. Nothing I couldn't probably have worked out for myself yet, just simple take input display output kind of stuff, just working with the console. The interesting bit will hopefully come later, when we actually make a program that, well, does something interesting, as thats the part I'm just not sure where to go with.

Other things continue well. Wonderful fun day reminding me why Red Gate is awesome on Monday, and now only a week to my holiday. Getting quite excited now!

Progress

I have my own SQL server on my machine now. Frustratingly I don't really have the tie to try to do much with it as Zara is off and I'm covering her work. Managed a bit of a fiddle today and a small play with the Data Mining addin for excel which was the reason I got it in the first place. Tomorrow hopefully I will have time to try pulling a suitable data set from our sales db to see if it can tell me interesting things.

In other news, my budding acting career has died before it began as the filming I was supposed to be an extra for tomorrow got rearranged so they needed people today instead, which I couldn't do. Poo.

Have had some dashboard building successes over the past week though, developing both a new calls widget to give a breakdown of call status after downloading, and then a complete re-work of the sales activity stats and creation of a spreadsheet where the guys can see how they are doing. The sales activity one was pretty easy and is almost entirely built off the cube, aside from a couple of bits I have to enter manually (bits from systems that are totally separate and with the access I have now I can't integrate them - I think....just had a thought on that one). The calls widget has to come from the db via powerpivot as the calls data isn't in the cube. At the moment it doesn't really do anything special, but I'll see if I can improve this going forward. At the moment the manual link via the call generation is the only way to try to track downloads start to finish, so I'll be having words with the boys to try to see if I can get any halfway respectable data.

Current status

Just a quick one tonight, going over where I feel I currently stand with all the stuff I am trying to learn.

Excel - Very strong, though I would like to learn more about coding in VBA to make better macros

PowerPivot - So-so, I've got the hang of pulling data in from cubes, doing OK with calculated fields, though I am sure there is a lot more to learn. 

SQL - Have started to learn, and with it being a fairly high level language its generally not too hard to work out what a query does from looking at it. Able to make basic edits to queries created by powerpivot. Really want to improve this one.

C# - Currently no clue. Course starts next week.

Testing - even less of a clue. Have some books to read.

Business Intelligence stuff - again, have books. Have not started to read books. 

Tomorrow hopefully I will (finally) get a SQL Server installed on my computer. Soon I should get my replacement PSU so I can get my home PC working again. At that point I'll probably need to start setting an alarm to get myself to bed, as I forsee me getting way too absorbed in learning stuff and missing the fact its now 3am and I really should be asleep.

In the beginning...

So, I've decided I fancy keeping a blog to talk to myself about how things are going as I throw myself in at the deep end of learning new stuff. So, for anyone who comes across this and has no idea whats going on, or for myself in the future who has actually had a brain meltdown and forgotten, heres where I am now.

I started working for Red Gate Software just over 4 months ago as a Customer Service Rep. Since then I have discovered the wonders of PowerPivot, started to investigate into the intricacies of SQL and signed up to learn C#. I have the opportunity to choose between learning to be a tester, or going into Business Intelligence, which is, I think, the side that now appeals more to me (hence the blog title). Or, being Red Gate (who are awesome) I could probably decide to learn to do both.

Except my brain might explode.

Might be a risk I'm willing to take though - could be interesting along the way.

So, at the moment, I am collecting an impressive number of books on my desk, and at some point I even have vague plans to read them. I have been watching a series of lectures from Stanford University that will hopefully teach me the basics of Databases (and if I keep up with the actual course that the uni is running I can even get a little statement saying I did it, which would be cool - and hopefully not overly taxing). In 2 weeks I start my C# course, and a week after that I go on holiday, where I think I will not allow myself to look at any of this stuff. Its the first holiday I've had in 6 years, and I intend to spend it relaxing.

As a CSR, things aren't hugely interesting, I keep an eye on what the sales guys are up to, I put information up on the whiteboards, and I spend a lot less time doing it that I think they expected me to. This means I have plenty of time each day for more interesting projects, so I think a run down of what I have at the moment might be cool. Here it is:

• Develop a dashboard that provides at a glance information about the sales activity and results
• Analyse the sales figures over the past couple of years to try to find out what works and what doesn't
• Try to establish the sales patterns and how downloads then process through to become income.
• Learn SQL
• Learn C#
• Learn about databases
• Learn about Testing

So I have a fair bit on. I don't mind this at all, as its great to be learning stuff, and its wonderful being in the sort of environment where they encourage this.


I am getting really positive feedback and I think I have some amazing opportinities here, and hopefully will have moved into a Business Analyst role pretty soon. Theres one currently advertising, but I understand they are wanting someone who knows what they are doing, however after that they will be looking at getting a graduate in - which I could easily be in spite of lacking the degree part, thanks to being an internal candidate. That would be dinstinctly awesome. I feel like I'm suddenly starting to have career options opening up to me which I never really considered before, and its a really good feeling!

Enough for today. This week I've not got any major things to get done, but Zara (my counterpart) is on holiday so I'm keeping an eye on her stuff too, which is a little distracting. On Friday I get to be a film extra for a company ad campaign, so that should be pretty interesting too. Maybe they can manage to get a half decent picture of me!