Solving Your Technology Needs

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu...

As per the Next Generation Tech Booster Challenge Program, we are asked to submit a daily progress report on slack. We just need to answer these three questions in the post: • What did I work on today? • What I will work on tomorrow? • What issues are blocking my progress? I take this logging opportunity to also report on the progress I am making with my Coursera course “Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB”; and my Linux Foundation course “LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals”.  To help with completing above, here are some links posted by the slack moderators that I try to use to get through my workload: How to Organize your Desk like a Pro Tips on how to achieve consistency Strategies we can employ to stop Procrastination Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the Eisenhower Box Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy The Ivy Lee Method The 15-Minute Routine Anthony Trollope Used to Write 40+ Books The instructor for the course is Daniel and is pure entertainment....

I had been planning to take the Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect track back when the prerequisite was AZ-303 and AZ-304. Life got in the way and now these two prerequisites have been deprecated and replaced by AZ-305. However, in order to take this exam, I needed to get through AZ-104 first. Here are resources that I used to prepare for it: * GlobalKnowledge/Skillsoft 4-day BootCamp. I have been using this training company for a while now but it has steadily just gotten worse. The trainers are outsourced and not very professional in my opinion. I do not recommend GlobalKnowledge at all. I didn’t really learn much from the lesson material but the lesson/challenge labs were very helpful. This bootcamp comes with an Azurepass subscription and a free exam voucher. I actually racked up to $90 out of the $100 credit provided on this subscription which expires in 12 days so I better delete all the resources before then to avoid incurring more. I initially booked the exam the end of Dec...

In November 2022, I realized that my webcam had stopped working. I took it down from above my door mount in order to troubleshoot closely. The unit would power on with a steady white lighting around the front but I was used to seeing green. When I press the button to reset it, it would reboot and start flashing different coloured lights but when I release the button, all lighting would stop.     I looked at Logitech’s support site to find out how to properly reset it. It was simply to hold the button a few seconds until lights start blinking, which is what I have been doing. I had the wired model so I plugged in the unit via USB to my Windows computer to attempt to connect to it. I had a hunch that there was a firmware update that it automatically tried to download and run, and that update caused this. I was right. A few other users on the Logitech forums reported the same symptoms I was experiencing with my Circle 2 webcam. Here was one specific post that I responded to:...

The "Wall of Graduates" is a Google sites page showing a profile list of students who graduated from the Udacity AI Product Manager nanodegree. We were asked two questions to include in our profile and there are those two questions.  What obstacles (big or small!) did you face during Phase 2 & how did you overcome them?    I think the biggest was time constraint. I was also doing my Georgia Tech course in the spring and this fell on the same timeline. The other obstacle is that the course material was not technical but more for product managers. This meant a lot of time was spent networking in slack participating community-driven initiatives. I did learn Artificial Intelligence concepts but it didn't need to last from December 2020-December 2021.  How are you making use of your newfound skills?  I don't use AI at work but it has allowed me to open my eyes to possibilities. We recently implemented MS Azure Cognitive service utilizing text translation. Althoug...

This was my proctored-exam transcript last night when I took the AWS Solutions Architect exam (SAA-C02) as part of my recertification because it expires every 3 years. This was a remote proctored exam through PSI and should have been easy because this wasn’t the first time I used their service. For whatever reason, last night’s experience was so bad  that an exam that started at 10:45pm didn’t finish until early morning 2:15am.  Some things that you could do to avoid what I went through: 1) Test your computer 24 hours before start time This was my fault and I should  tested sooner. I did start preparing foe the prerequisites as early as 8pm and thought I had enough time to complete everything as it was the same computer I used three years ago when I got certified with AWS. However, I found that since the last time I took this exam, my hardware changed (different web cam, different speakers) and I installed more software like Docker that the proctoring software (PSI Secure...