Online Courses

Work today was busy. One of my co-workers wanted me to go over in Zoom how to put together a particular query, and then once she had me in Zoom went "and just one more thing" a few times with unrelated queries, which amused me.

Annoyingly, the way I'd thought should work -- use a UNION with NULLs as placeholder values for the columns that didn't exist for one of the queries to unite -- generated a conversion error message for absolutely no reason. HMPH.

My bank has been planning to replace pretty much all of our software packages, which is kind of amazing given how long they have resisted changing some of these systems. One element of the overall strategy has been "get everyone more training" so they contracted with a huge online tech training site to let everyone take as many online courses as they want. I started one for BigQuery, Google's query tool. We're not using it yet but it looks like we will at some point in the future.

The course includes labs using BigQuery, which is pretty cool. Each lab has you make a temporary student account in BigQuery, and then you can use the student account to do the lab assignments. Three weeks ago, I got to the first lab and was completely mystified by it because the instructions for the lab in no way matched the actual options available in BigQuery. I spent ten or fifteen confused and frustrated minutes trying to figure out how to match what I could do with what the lab was telling me to do, and then gave up.

I was out sick the following week. Last week, I went back to try the lab again and see if it had miraculously fixed itself. I discovered that the course had marked the lab complete, with a grade of 100%, instead.

...

I thought about wrestling with the lab again ANYWAY because I actually want to learn the product and not just get a digital record that says I learned the product. But I decided to take the win and moved on to the next lesson. There would be more labs and this lab had looked like more like a tutorial on how to use the GUI than anything more detailed.

Today, I made it through some video lessons on SQL (I even learned things I didn't know, which might seem surprising given that I've been writing SQL queries for ~20 years. It did not surprise me because everything I know about SQL I learned either by dissecting someone else's code or from Stack Overflow.) And I got to the next lab.

This time, I got to a confusing part at the start of the lab (I don't remember what happened three weeks ago so I am not sure if it was the same confusing part) and made Lut look at my screen while I said "where is this option, it's supposed to be here, oh now I see it, thank you." Rubber ducking ftw?

Anyway, the actual lab part was "take our broken queries and fix them", which was pretty fun. The lab also included muItiple-choice questions to test whether you understood the fix, which were incredibly bad and obnoxious. One of the multiple-choice answers it insisted that I select before it would mark the section complete was "SQL code is missing a page title".

Reader, I do not know what a "page title" is supposed to be in a SQL query. I have been writing queries for 20+ years and I have never put a page title in the code for any query. The videos that went over writing SQL code did not mention the phrase "page title". Nothing in the example of "corrected code" appeared to be a page title. I have no idea what the lab meant by this question or why it thought a page title was a necessary component.

I did a lot of cursing at the terrible questions.

The lab was timed, but the timing was generous -- it allowed fifty minutes and I finished in twenty-five or so.

The funny part about this, to me, is how anxious and upset the timer made me. When I was in school and had timed tests all the time, and school was my only priority, I never worried about tests or completing on time. Now, when I often contemplate retiring early and have zero concerns about staying employed or getting another job in this field, the idea that I might RUN OUT OF TIME is EXTREMELY UPSETTING. Never mind that I can retake the lab an infinite number of times until I finish it within the allotted time frame. I am yelling at these multiple choice questions for not making sense when literally I can pass them just by picking options at random until it tells me I'm done. I do not know why I am so wound up over these things.

Anyway, I passed the lab and the test and then discovered that the next "week" of lessons were all pretty short, so I finished that week and now I'm ahead of the course again, yay!

I worked an extra 40 minutes today, which I never do. But there was a live Google workspace tips thing that started right after I normally log off work, and I wanted to attend it. And I wanted to finish the last few minutes of week five's lesson plan so I could take the quiz while the lessons were still fresh. Week five was boring, though, just going over pricing plans for BigQuery. Which is sort of important even for someone totally uninvolved in the purchase decisions, because you need to know how to optimize your queries for the pricing structure so that you don't wind up racking up unnecessary processing charges.

I like the online course structure overall, though. The hands-on labs using the actual software are a good touch; I feel like I'm actually learning something useful.

After work, I took a nap, and then picked up takeout at Lut's request, and visited my local friends for a little while. I tried to call Terry, but his phone didn't even go to voicemail this time. :/ Just got a "person is not available -click-" message. Hopefully I can reach him tomorrow.