Return and Recap

So I've been meaning to get back to this blog for some time, and just…well I just haven't. Anyway, here we are, so it's time for a quick recap of what I've been up to technically the past couple of years. (Quick because I'd written a long version and MarsEdit lost the draft…said software is now uninstalled! What follows is the very brief re-write).

Education, education, education

Learning has been my thing. In 2016 I started the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science and completed it in early 2017. Ten courses. Some really interesting and engaging. Some not so much. The final project was challenging, mainly as I was in the second iteration of the course and some issues were still being ironed out. The course team were excellent though and the effort involved was ultimately worthwhile.

I then went through a short phase of doing courses on edX. The pick of the bunch was Delivering A Data Warehouse In The Cloud.

This February, I finally completed the Microsoft exams to gain the MCSE: Data Management & Analytics and the MCSA: BI Reporting. No more studying for a while please!

Work

The past couple of years at my main client has involved implementing Power BI and a SQL data warehouse with SSAS Tabular models. The ETL part has been built using BIML, which has been an absolute godsend. It's saved me an incredible amount of development time. I'm still loving Power BI, and thankfully the business users are engaged with it too. I can't get enough of those R visuals. 🙂

Other Projects

Recently I've been building a new database and web app for the association I do voluntary work for. The backend is a SQL Azure Database and I've been using Node.js Express for the web app. I'd only really touched Node.js a little before so it's quite the learning curve. I dabbled with .Net Core but I wasn't getting on with it as much as I hoped. Developing with Visual Studio Code on Mac is a nice experience though.

Community

There are more community events in Scotland these days, and I've been trying to get to as many as I can reasonably make. The new Glasgow SQL User Group has been excellent, and the first SQLGLA event was great, already looking forward to the next one in September. I've also managed to make a couple of the Glasgow Azure User Group sessions as the content has usually been relevant to what I'm doing or interested in. One I've not made yet, but is on my list, is EdinbR.

So now I just need to think of more ideas for blog posts…