Yea, I think I held myself back a LOT with some weird distorted sense of machismo insisting everything had to be done in as raw a way as possible. Heck I used to do all my website development in notepad -- even vim feels like cheating with syntax highlighting.
As if the best carpenters don't all use tools or something.
Same haha I still have some of my old .txt files… it’s funny how far we’ve come
Nice of you to say "we" haha; you're far more accomplished with code than I am.
Though I am pretty pleased with where I got with SQL, PowerBI, Excel, even if I do find it somewhat less useful for personal projects.
Haha well I almost failed my college excel class! So in some ways you are outdoing myself… for some reason I didn’t enjoy my college CS courses
Sometimes classes on things you already have a strong foundation in can be like that I've found. You get bored to sleep for the first chunk and by the time they catch up with what you know you're on your back feet trying to figure out how they're talking about things. That, or the busywork is just infuriating (I run into this occasionally on Coursera).
I've always generally done much better with self directed things, though I do like discussion as a way to ensure I know what I think I know.
Fwiw I don't think I could hang with a classroom based excel class either. I learned mine primarily with LinkedIn Learning and Coursera, and then some on the job practice (with some help from Copilot to keep things moving).
Got me to the point where I've used features the actual higher level analysts at my company aren't familiar with, with things like PowerPivot, data modeling, DAX, and the occasional M code (though this is an area I know is there but always resort to AI for dabbling with for now).
I think a good chunk of my motivation to learn came from pointing it at some open datasets from the Fed, treasury international capital, and BIS. Makes life more interesting than going through hypothetical company's inventory and other nonsense the courses would throw at you...
So very true!!
