I haven’t posted anything, but I’ve been continuing to read Data Science from Scratch. I’ll try to do quick summaries of those chapters later this week.

My time this week has been chewed up by starting my class at UNLV. The MIS 766 course is a graduate level introductory course in databases. So far the class seems pretty straight-forward. It’s not a lot of work, but it is work that is crammed into a relatively short period of time. This is normally a 16 week course that has been squeezed into 5 weeks. I’m probably putting in about 2-3 hours a day for these first couple days, but I’d expect that to creep upward as we get into some of the more complicated material.

My time is split between watching videos (at 2x speed, so it saves me some time there), doing some readings, and doing the assignments. Of course, the bulk of the time is doing the assignments. There’s a case study for each week, plus daily discussion posts and some other exercises. We’ve also got a group project, but we haven’t really started any work on that yet.

In the first couple days, we’ve done a general introduction to database management, which was primarily trying to justify why individual spreadsheets scattered around an organization is a really bad idea, and we’re just starting into the database design process.