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.