A Cloudy Day

So…

• I missed the last day of my workshop to stay up from 4am to 1:30am the next day doing a course that was supposed to take one week to complete…and I did it in one day!

Um…

• See, I was given this coupon, and it gave me access to the class for free, and the training is super important for me, but I had to complete it by July 2nd.

• Since I start a new workshop which may have a heavy workload, in addition to the Udacity Nanodegree, I had to make sure I got it done before I started my workshop today.

And so I did…

• Basically, it’s a warming-up to some of the concepts I’ll be doing for another workshop in July, and possibly for some technologies I’ll be learning in September.

My Impression

• I did some of these labs last year at Google LA (for three days). Basically, they’ve integrated this training (intro) into a Cousera specialization. I guess they’re hoping that people get up to speed and that the on-site training will be more in-depth. Hooray to that.

• Man, was it really unpolished back when I took it, although I was happy to learn.

Differences

• When I did tiny bits of the course last year, the instructions were pretty gnarly. That has changed.

• Also, you’d have to remember your Project ID, only they wouldn’t tell you, so you’d have to go back and find it, in the very buggy interface, praying and hoping that it would go OK. Now, you just type PROJECT_ID and it uses the name of your project ID. Excellent!

  

• It was dependency hell last time, and I had gotten a lot of errors and warnings. Now..things just sort of work.

• I did get one error, but I was able to fix it by looking up their thorough documentation.

• Also, last time, the labs were sort of Ad-hoc. So I wasn’t sure when they said to “clean up” your interface after each lab, whether that meant I’d have to delete it completely or not. Of course, when the next part said “remember that thing you did last time?” (you didn’t delete it, right?), it was a source of frustration and an accumulation of errors…but they fixed it!

This means “You didn’t mess it up” in JSON!

• Cue the cat memes!

Organization meets logic

• Now it’s one entire, sequential lab, which is nice!

I’m running instances and containers and stuff! The joy!

• I did screw up on the External IP API for one lab, but because it’s so much better organized, that sort of thing is an easy fix.

Maybe I just understand it better, now.

• Everything just sort of made sense

I even did some Queries on Big Query

So yeah..

• With my newly minted certificate in hand, I’m going to sleep…to be up in a few hours to head to my first Workshop in “Coding for Product”.

• See you there? :)