Andrew Wegner | Ponderings of an Andy - learning

Review of Claude Code for Python Developers from Real Python

2026-04-06T10:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

If you are in the software industry and haven't started working with an AI assistant by this point in 2026, then you should start getting concerned about your role in the company you work at. Throughout the first few months of 2026, there have been several large layoffs by major corporations. Companies like Block and Oracle cited AI as the driver.

AI is here and as of today, it's the least capable it will ever be, because each day it gets better. I've been exploring it since ChatGPT came out and it's impact on interviews. I've written about it multiple times recently. AI's impact on junior developers is particularly important because I'm already seeing this in my role.

My teams have been utilizing a handful of AI assistants over the past year and making amazing improvements to our workflows. From things as simple as reducing the SDLC cycle time for major features to triage of support items, the impact has been dramatic.

I feel like I've only touched the surface - not even scratched it - touched the surface of how to better use AI tooling, and I've been using it a lot. So, I looked for a workshop to increase my knowledge. As a subscriber to Real Python, I was happy to see they offered a brand new workshop about Claude Code and as of this writing they are offering it again.

The course - Claude Code for Python Developers: Hands-On Agentic Coding Course. A bit wordy, but an amazing two days.

Spoiler¶

As a spoiler, my review of the course is on the main course page.

"Learning about how Claude Code works was great. Working with things like Skills, learning a workflow that functions, was what I was hoping to learn about. All of those were covered."

"I feel more comfortable with the tool itself and how to implement a basic workflow for myself with ideas on how to extend it to a whole team."

"This is one of the best training sessions I've joined in the last year across multiple platforms."

— Andrew Wegner, VP Product at Zayo

Course¶

As you can see from above, I thought this course was great. It was a two day (over a weekend) live course with about 100 participants from around the world. Based on the chat during the course, the skill set of participants ranged from "new to Claude code but experienced developer" to "somewhat familiar with Claude Code and looking to do more with it". It was a nice mix of participants. The instructor, Philipp Acsany, did a good job of answering questions, sharing content, and ensuring everyone was able to follow along. This was very hands on workshop.

Before the course began, set up instructions were sent out. I can not overstate how much this was appreciated, because that meant the course could assume that everyone has a functioning environment to work in. This saved so much time and basic questions and allowed the course to start with the interesting content, not a tutorial on how to install Claude Code, GitHub CLI, Python and uv, Git and Zoom.

Day 1 started with the very basics of Claude. Normally, I'd be annoyed by starting with such a basic concept, but Philipp kept it engaging and more importantly, showed some best practicies using Claude to scaffold a new project that I hadn't seen. Thinking that this bodes well for the rest of the course, I eagerly followed along.

As Day 1 moved on, we built upon our scaffold to develop a small application, learning how to manipulate various aspects of claude, setting up prompts and skills to assist our workflow and learning how to debug when something doesn't work. Day 1 concluded with a little bit of homework. After 4 hours in the workshop, I felt pretty confident that I could accomplish this and was happy to see that confidence was justified. After about an hour more of individual work, I completed the tasks and was ready for day 2.

Day two built on top of the homework by adding in additional features, ensuring we were able to utilize various skills, and learning more about how Claude operates under the hood. The session concluded with quick demos of additional aspects of Claude - hooks, MCPs, and Agents. Honestly, this was my biggest disappointment in the course, because it showed so many things we wouldn't be getting to, but it did fill my "research later" queue.

Conclusion¶

This isn't a cheap course. But, it was worth it to me. I approached this with two goals in mind:

Learn something for myself that I could take and apply to personal projects
Learn something for my teams so that we could use it as inspiration to make further improvements to our workflows

Both of these were met in Day 1. That made Day 2 even more fun for me, because I showed up wanting to learn more, cover more, do more. As I said in my review on Real Python: This is one of the best training sessions I've joined in the last year across multiple platforms.

Through out the course, student questions were responded to - both live via Philipp and in chat via one of Philipp's partners or from other participants. I found this aspect of the course really valuable too. I did get a handful of questions answered during it, but I was able to provide answers as well.

So, why did I only give this a 9 out of 10? What's preventing that last star?

There are aspects of the course that were touched on so briefly that I think would have been useful to dive into. These are the topics that have ended up in my research queue - hooks, mcp services, agents, agent teams. I think these could have filled another 4 hour block, but this was a weekend course and didn't fit. I'll be watching for a session that covers these topics.

The other thing - the cost can be prohibitive to students. There is the cost of the course itself: $800 normally, $500 on sale when I joined. Plus the cost of Claude. It is recommended to get at last the MAx plan which runs $100 per month. I agree with that. I think if I'd only gone with Pro, I'd have hit usage limits during the course.

That said, if you can afford it (or get work to cover it as training), this is worth it for both an introduction to Claude Code and to learn about features you likely aren't using to their full power. Even with this course, I don't think I am doing that yet, but I know what to research now to get better for personal usage and for team improvements.

Review of Data Analysis with Polars Udemy course

2024-01-29T11:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

After the previous course about Polars, I was excited to learn more. I settled on Data Analysis with Polars with Liam Brannigan instructing. I was drawn to this because of the mention of visualization using Matplotlib, Seaborn, Altair and Plotly. The course is billed at 2.5 hours long and is currently going for $85, though I did pick this up during one of Udemy's many sales.

Let's get started on the review and why I rated it so low.

Course¶

I have multiple complaints about this course.

The entire course is reading from pre-built notebooks or slides.
The last 26 out of 27 lectures are one page slides.
The quizzes in the middle of the courses are not effective, because the course is not designed for the learner to actually do any coding.
The excercises at the end of lectures are never revisited.

This course felt like the instructor was given a bunch of Jupyter notebooks but a more senior instructor and told to go teach the class. There is a lot of reading directly from the notebook, quickly glossing over code, and then talking through the output of the code. Unlike the last course, this one doesn't even feel like a cookbook of usefulness. It's just a glorified slide deck.

Let me show you what I mean. This is the course list's last 4 sections. I've collapsed them to show only the section header so it's a reasonable sized screenshot.

There are 27 lectures in these 4 sections. The total estimated time for these 27 lectures - 7 minutes. There is only 1 video in this entire group of sections. The other 26 out of 27 lectures are one page slides. The slides are "What you'll learn by the end of this lecture" slides and a link to a Jupyter notebook.

The quizzes scattered through out the course are also ineffective. Many of the questioned asked are asking what code provided is correct. These can be helpful, if the learner has done any hands work during the course. But, this course isn't designed that way. It's an instructor reading slides, hand waving at some code, and then executing the code to show it works. It's ineffective.

The same problem holds true with the excercises at the end of many lectures. They are designed to get the student more experience and I started doing them early in the course. But, they are never revisited. The instructor doesn't talk about them. It's just homework that's assigned as busy work, essentially.

Conclusion¶

Avoid this course. nearly half the course is just a single slide for the lectures. The items I was interested in learning about - visualizations - were among those one page slides. The course is designed like a glorified README, and its not worth the sales price I paid, let along the full price.

Review of Learn Data Analytics with Polars (Python) Course

2024-01-25T08:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

I started this entire Course Reviews series 7 years ago, with a post about a Pandas course. It went so well, I continued both taking various courses to expand my own knowledge and sharing my experiences with those courses here. It seems fitting to look at a Pandas competitors: Polars.

I've used Pandas for years and it's done the job well enough. But, Polars is gaining traction in the industry and one of the data engineers at work mentioned it as a possible tool to look at. I like to be informed when my engineers make tooling recommendations, so I took it upon myself to learn a little more about Polars. I did so by selecting a course by Kieran Keene, titled Learn Data Analytics with Polars (Python) in just 2 hours!. I got this course duing another of Udemy's sales for $13.

About the course¶

The entire course is run out of Google Colab. This is nice, because you don't need to set up a virtual environment or install anything to take this course.

The course is taught with Polars version 0.17.3, which is from April 2023. I took this course in January 2024, so I used the current version - 0.20.2. This introduces a few very minor deprecations from the older version, but simply reading the deprecation warning for each tells you how to solve the problem.

Named, the two deprecations that I recall running into:

In 0.17 there is the df.apply() function. This has been deprecated in favor of df.map_rows()
The groupby() function has been deprecated in favor of group_by()

Both take exactly the same arguments, so it was as simple as renaming the instructors function to the modern one.

The one other minor difference is that the example data has changed at some point between when the course material was recorded and when I took the course. This doesn't change how any of the lectures behave or any of the examples act. It does change a couple results, so I couldn't compare exact numbers between what I received and what the instructor received.

This was not a problem though. The instructor does a very good job of explaining what each lecture is going to teach, shows at least one method of accomplishing the task, and then summarizing the lecture. Through this, it's easy to determine if the results you get with the different sample data returns an accurate result.

I enjoyed the short lectures. I believe the longest single lecture is 11 minutes long, but each builds off of what you've done previously. By introducing these natural break points, it's easy to complete a topic and then spend a couple minutes experimenting with other methods or logic to see how the library behaves.

Additionally, there are multiple ways to perform certain tasks, and the instructor takes the time to explain each of these. Building off of one another, it's easy to determine which is appropriate for the scenario being discussed.

Speaking of scenarios, the course concludes with two short challenges. The goal is to use the knowledge gained from previous lectures to figure out results to two problems. If you followed along through the hour and a half course, these should be pretty easy to figure out but do require combining multiple steps to get to the answer.

Conclusion¶

I enjoyed this course, the instructor's teaching method, and two challenges at the end to tie the course back to the lectures. This was a very hands on course and the breaks between lectures and sections encouraged experimenting with the library.

Experimenting helps me learn more about the tool, and I commend the instructor for building the course in such a way that students could try out the library.

I also found that I liked the Polars library. Pandas has it's quirks and when I dig more into Polars, I'm sure I'll find it has some too. But, Polars feels easier to grasp. The API is easier to understand as you are reading through the code.

I think I'm going to try out another course to see what else the library can do. That alone should be a complement to both the library and this course - it's encouraged me to keep learning more.

Review of Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course

2024-01-22T10:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

I received a coupon code for Houssem Dellai's Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course. I've written about GitLab runners and the CI/CD process of that tool in the past. I've used GitHub actions to check this blog for broken links. I've used TravisCI (and written why not to trust TravisCI). I've used and BitBucket Pipelines in my professional life. I wanted to learn a big more about what GitHub Actions could do and the coupon code made this 4 hour course worth the time to investigate.

You'll see below in more detail, but this course was not what I expected. It's advertised as being for "All beginners" and "Ops experts". I argue that both of these are incorrect. This course felt more like a 20-30 lecture "GitHub Actions Cookbook" than a course looking to explain GitHub actions.

Let's go through it...

Course Overview¶

There are multiple formats the instructor uses in this course. It's pretty obvious that the sections in this lecture were recorded independantly. Some lectures take place entirely within the GitHub interface, some are using Powerpoint slides to drive the lecture, one is done on a whiteboard. To me, it seems the various lectures have been bundled together.

After a bit of research - and a mid-lecture "Check out my YouTube" - it's clear why that feeling exists. The lectures are available on YouTube. Not all of the videos on YouTube are part of this course, but scrolling through, I can quickly see that many of the videos in the course are on YouTube.

As for the content of the course, it doesn't match what I was expecting. With the "All beginners" advertisement, I was expecting more discussion and coverage on why certain things were being done. A discussion on the trade offs or the instructor's through process on how to accomplish tasks.

Instead, the content is a lot of "this is my code to accomplish this task". It is a great course to get the quick run down of how to accomplish tasks, especially with Azure. However, it is not a good course if you want to know why a specific block of code is the best route to go. It's a cookbook to accomplish a task. A handful of lectures do cover theory, but these are few and very far between.

Conclusion¶

If my coupon hadn't knocked off the entire price of the course, I'd be upset with this one. I also picked up two other courses by this instructor and I suspect I'm going to find similar concerns with those courses. Honestly, that's to bad, because the content is good. It's just not marketed how it's packaged. With my expectations set for learning a bit, it's disappointing to get lectures that are designed to be copy and pasted from.

Don't come into this expecting to learn a lot of reasoning behind how things are accomplished. If you need an overview of how to accomplish the tasks in the content list though, you'll find that. It'll be a relatively dry walkthrough of the exact code you need. But, if you want to know why...this isn't the course for you.

If you can find a coupon code for this, I think it's worth your time to see how some of these advanced tasks are accomplished. If you can't find that coupon though, head over to the instructor's YouTube page and watch that section for free.

Review of Unreal Engine 5 Generative Motion Graphics VFX Course

2023-04-14T09:15:00-05:00

Introduction¶

After my last venture into Unreal Engine where I built a simple 2D platformer, I wanted to continue learning about blue prints, but take a set of lessons that would be relatively quick. I found a great course for that in Yu Fujishiro's Unreal Engine 5 | Generative Motion Graphics / VFX course on Udemy.

The course is billed as an hour and a half course that will help the learner gain comfort in using the Unreal Engine as an art and design tool. Here's the result of my work from this course, and I am happy with the result.

Course Overview¶

The hour and a half estimated time is slightly misleading, as the instructor is approaching the course expecting that the student has some experience. Fortunately, the handful of Unreal Engine courses I've taken since last year were enough for me to feel comfortable in this course.

The first "5 minute" section of the course depends on that knowledge (and your ability to Google) to set up and configure the project. It's not difficult. I will save you a bit of time on one step though. This minute and a half video on installing the DLSS plugin was more useful than pages of text from NVidia.

With that out of the way, it's onto the course material. The instructor is clear about the what and the why we are doing things. I appreciated the explaination of small bits of logic and the migration from hard coded sections to more dynamic blue prints. It was a good way to introduce a concept and the same type of thing I've done when teaching beginners.

I have one issue with my blue print logic that the instructor didn't seem to have. I'm not sure if it's due to different versions of the engine. I was using 5.1.1 and I believe they were using 5.0.

See that emission node down on the lower left? In the course, the instructor has this set to a default of 0.0. If I left this at 0.0, my cubes were all black. They'd start with the color I selected, but on the first split the children would be black cubes instead of the expected shifting hue of colors. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong, but adjusting the default solved my problem.

The only other oddness - at least to me - was the process of exporting a high quality render. In a previous course I exported a video as MP4, I learned that through Google and a plugin. This course exports as an EXR file format. I've never utilized this before so was initially confused by the giant dump of individual files I received.

Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve (and the course I took on it) can handle this without problems. This is how I created the video show casing my work above.

Conclusion¶

This course was short and sweet. It took me approximately two and a half hours to get through. This accounts for environment set up, playing around with various colors and values to make the composition unique, and the emission bug I mentioned above. I was looking for a short course that focused on a single "thing" and was pleased with how this turned out.

There are few things that I didn't like were the assumption that the students had experience. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the instructor does reference "previous courses" a handful of times but they only have this course on Udemy at the time of publishing this post. Another negative was the instructor's push of a paid for Unreal Plugin. This was for electronic wires, versus the curvy ones from the image above. The electronic wires allow for a more compact blue print - which I can see being valuable in a very large project like the 2D Platformer - but in a short course it does cause the wires the overlap and can be difficult to follow. It also costs an additional $13.

Overall, this was an entertaining course and I am happy with the output I produced. It was very satisfying the first time I pressed play and watched my cube split, flash, lauch a few small sparks, and repeat. I recommend this course for someone with a basic Unreal Engine experience and a few hours to learn.

Review of Learn How To Make A 2D Platformer In Unreal Engine 5 Course

2023-04-11T13:15:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I spent a portion of late summer/early fall 2022 learning a little bit about Unreal Engine 5. I reviewed a course covering designing a realistic landscape environment, designing a realistic cabin, and building a small game. Each of these furthered my interest in learning more about Unreal Engine and everything is capable of doing.

The next thing to learn about in my Unreal journey was blueprints. You can build an entire game without writing code, and I wanted to learn more about how to accomplish this. I selected "Learn How To Make A 2D Platformer In Unreal Engine 5" by Uisco Dev to take this next step.

A quick spoiler before you get further down - the content of this course was pretty good. The demo I have below shows what I was able to accomplish following along with this course. The presentation of this course was frustrating and an excersice in patience to get through.

On to the review...

Course Overview¶

Negative Aspects¶

This course is advertised as a 7 hour course. If you are following along, as I was, with the course on one monitor and the Unreal Engine development environment on another, it's going to take much longer than 7 hours. The reason for this is how the instructor presents the course. It took me a month to get through the course.

It seems that the instructor is expecting students to watch the course and work in Unreal Engine at different times. There is a lot of statements like "connect these two nodes", or "connect this to the new node" - which on the surface are relevant. What isn't noticed though, because you are rapidly clicking through the blue prints and attempting to keep up, is that the instructor has moved to another node or isn't explaining which output needs to be connected to the new node.

So, the you need to pause the video, rewind a few seconds to get oriented, and rewatch. Then you go back to Unreal Engine and replicate the change. But, you didn't pause the video so the instructor continued to move on while you were catching up and the process repeats multiple times in a 5 minute lesson. That five minute lesson quickly becomes a 20 minute lesson because of the constant shifts between the lecture and the course with few natural break points.

Positive Aspects¶

The content of this course is really good. I mentioned above that I wanted to learn about blue prints and this course did a great job of showing how powerful blue prints are. It also provided an eye opening overview of how "simple" things are more complex under the hood.

A simple coin pick up system involve setting up a sprite, checking for collision and ensure it's the player and not an enemy, adding the coin to the player's count of coins and doing something if you collect enough coins. Conceptually, I knew all the happened, but setting it up showed just how much goes into the small aspects. Setting up a player or an enemey that will fight and interact with the environment is even more complex.

I really enjoyed learning those aspects of simple game development.

Another positive attribute of this course is the instructor interaction. The instructor has cultivated an environment of providing answers and explaining how the answer can be found or set up in the future. The is one of the most active Q&A sections on Udemy that I've seen. This should be commended.

Lastly, the instructor has updated the course to account for differences in Unreal Versions. The course was originally developed for Unreal Engine 5.0. I utilize 5.1 and appreciate that there are a handful of lectures - specifically during control set up - that show the differences between 5.0 and 5.1. While I was taking this course Epic released a preview version of 5.2. I imagine the instructor will be adding lectures as appropriate to show differences with that version in the future.

Conclusion¶

As mentioned above, the presentation of this course was frustrating. On several occassions I considered stopping the course because I was so frustrated with the constant pause, rewind, replay, repeat cycle. Normally, I enjoy getting through a section at a time in a Udemy course and on many occassions here, I could barely get through a handful of lectures before I needed to stop for the day.

However, the content of the course was very useful and I was learning. I would have appreciated some more "why" lectures but those existed for the areas that I felt they were most appropriate. It's the useful content and that I was learning something that would pull me back in after a day or two of being away from the course.

Below is my final result. Obviously, it's a bit basic, but for a month of work I'm rather proud of how it turned out. I am walking away from this with more understanding of how blueprints work and that was my goal.

Review of DaVinci Resolve 2022: Beginner to Advanced in DaVinci 18 Course

2023-03-03T23:45:00-06:00

Introduction¶

In my two previous course reviews - the beginners Unreal Engine course, and the realistic environment course - I presented a short YouTube clip of what I'd built. For both of those, I used DaVinci Resolve to quickly stitch together a few clips. There was nothing fancy in those, but while doing it I was impressed at the shear number of options and capabilities that DaVinci had available.

I decided to take beginner course to learn some more about the product. Spoiler: I'm ever more impressed by Resolve and at the same time know that I have learned only a tiny fraction of what it's true capabilties are. There is so much to learn about individual sections of this product that a single course could (and probably is) dedicated to each of those.

However, before I can dive deep into the product, I wanted to get a broad overview of it. I also wanted to really edit something using what I learned to get a good feel for the tool. I settled on DaVinci Resolve 2022: Beginner to Advanced in DaVinci 18 by Marius Manola on Udemy.

Course Overview¶

This was a ten hour course that covers major areas of DaVinci Resolve 18. The instructor is opinionated on their workflow and discourses devisions for that in a few places. The most notable on is avoiding the use of the "Cut" tab all together, and instead do all edits and cuts in the "Edit" tab. As a beginner, I am sure there is a reason for the "Cut" tab but this course does not dive into it.

Other tabs are covered to varying depths. The two that are covered the most are "Edit" (taking a bulk of the time during project demonstrations) and "Fusion". "Color" gets a section of lectures, but I felt this was more a demonstration of capabilites than an explaination of why something is occuring. To be fair to the author, I think they realize that their audience (ie. me) aren't professional editors or have color grading training or experience. Both of those are college degrees, I believe. The "Fairlight" tab (sound editing) gets even less of a mention than color.

The Good¶

This course was approachable to me. My experience with Resolve was smashing a couple clips together and rendering a final video. After this course, I now feel I can do that much more effectively, as well as introduce a few small effects and edits.

The author is good at talking through what they are doing. I don't recall any "draw the rest of the owl" moments. This helped if I got lost while poking through my own instead of Resolve, instead of just watching.

The author is using DaVinci Resolve 18, which at the time I took the couse was the most recent version. I had a minor release update, but many other courses I saw on Udemy were for older versions of Resolve. One of the things I didn't like about the Unreal courses what that the instructor used early access or beta versions of the tool, while I was utilizing a full release, so the UI was not always the same.

Working through the project was educational. My version didn't turn out exactly like the instructor's did and I think that's a good thing here. As a creative process, editing a video is going to be different for everyone.

The Bad¶

Ironically, there were a few areas that I thought could use better editing. A handful of times the instructor would demonstrate a new feature and it wouldn't work as expected. They'd redo it and it'd work. The first attempt would be vaguly glossed over and the instructor would move on. I think the failure would have been removed from the lecture, with a minimiumal impact on understanding of the concept.

The projects we did involved a lot of watching the instructor click around the screen while the student was, theorectially, following along. I think this was not the right way to present the project walk throughs. I found myself pausing the video a lot so that I could attempt something on my own project. I'd understand the idea for the current task and then move ahead. Eventually, I'd complete what I was working on and restart the video only to find out that the next several minutes in the walkthrough were roughly what I just did.

Focusing on the lecture at the same time I was focusing on my project wasn't possible. I think a better way to present this would be been a short instruction section showing the skill we'd be using, and then letting the student perform that task.

The instructor loves jump cuts in the projects. A lot of jump cuts. I wish we'd been able to cover a bit more about transitioning between shots or advancing the visual story. However, I suspect that's more of a filming technique that was out of scope for this course.

The Ugly¶

The instructor is using a computer with a loud system fan and no noise canceling. It's very obvious when the computer is struggling because the fan noise gets louder. For a while I thought it was either my computer (it wasn't) or my headphones (again, it wasn't). My suggestion to the author is to apply a bit of noise cancelation to the frequency your fan operates it, because with headphones it is very clear that the fan is running.

Conclusion¶

I found this course to be a great introduction to DaVinci Resolve. While my first project isn't going to win any awards, it's important to remember that it's my first project. I can already think of several other projets I can use Resolve for and I feel comfortable using it for these personal projects.

The areas that weren't extensively covered feel like great next steps, and not "the instructor didn't have time to do this". I mentioned it above, but I suspect these areas (and the ones that were covered) could be their own course or set of courses.

I got what I wanted out of the course, and perhaps a little more. The instructor did a good job covering the material, demonstrating the tooling while building the projects, and expressing opinions on workflow which I think are helpful to someone new.

Without further ado...my first video edit.

My self assessment of this video is that it feels like a novice edited it. (Surprise! I'm a novice at this). I'm not a fan of all of the jump cuts. It gets..."jarring" is perhaps the best way to describe it. But, this was the editing style the instructor went with. I've love to learn about other options so that it feels less jarring.

Review of GitLab's 'TeamOps Certification' course

2023-02-02T23:00:00-06:00

Introduction¶

A little over two years ago, I took GitLab's course on how to manage a remote team. That was a very useful course and I was able to apply several best practices from that course to my role at the time, plus roles I've held since then. I continue to manage global and remote teams, so I was excited to hear about GitLab's newest course covering their "TeamOps" model of improving teams.

This course is hosted on LevelUp, and is one of 9 public course they have available right now.

Course Overview¶

The TeamOps Certification course is split into 5 sections and covers about 2-3 hours of material.

The first section covers the foundations of TeamOps
The remaining four sections cover the 4 guiding principles of TeamOps
- Shared Reality
- Everyone Contributes
- Decision Velocity
- Measurement Clarity

Except for the welcome message in the first lesson, this course is entirely text based. I was surprised by this because of the previous course from GitLab and the extensive use of video on how to manage a remote team. This course does have a 6-7 question knowledge check at the end of each section and will not let you proceed if you score below an 80%.

Fortunately, the questions are easy - assuming you comprehend what you are reading and not just clicking through to the next page. The course also provides access to the updated The Remote Playbook, which is a great starting point for checking your company's remote processes.

TeamOps felt like a good extension and refresher from the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course. Unfortunately, that's all it felt like - a refresher.

Conclusion¶

The change from video to text based courses was surprising, and slightly unwelcome. The content of the course is good, and will definately help teams improve how they operate. However, many of the same ideas were covered in the previous course. I suppose that if this continues to work for GitLab, it makes sense that they aren't trying to make sweeping changes, but I was hoping for...more, I suppose.

I recommend this course to anyone who manages a team remotely and needs a refresher from the previous course GitLab provided or doesn't have the recommended 11 hours for that course. This should take about an hour and a half to read through. If, however, you have more time I think the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course course has even more information that will be helpful.

Review of Unreal Engine 5 Beginners Guide to Building an Environment

2022-10-18T23:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

In my third adventure into learning little bit about Unreal Engine 5, I set out to learn a little bit more about modeling water. This was kind of brushed over in the first course I took, and not touched at all in the second course. I was hoping to learn about real time water simulation based on a couple of the course content section headers.

Spoiler: That's not in this course. However, I was not disappointed in the course.

I settled on Unreal Engine 5 Beginners Guide to Building an Environment by 3D Tudor.

Course Overview¶

Udemy says this is an 18.5 hour course. Plan on more than that. The instructor does a great job at explaining what the goal of the section is, how it will be accomplished, and then showing how it's done. The end goal of the course is building a little cabin in the mountains along a lake. You go from nothing, to basic blocking out the cabin, to setting up the landscape. From there you build the cabin, set up foliage, adding textures and details, to setting up the water material.

I mentioned earlier that I was hoping for a real time water simulation. You don't get that here, but you do spend some time building and setting up a water material that can be customized extensively. There are lessons on setting up a waterfall, building and animating birds in the background, and adding fireflies. Time is spent building a fire pit and simulating the fire and smoke. Finally it ends with setting up a camera and rendering the scene.

Overall, this course covers a LOT and the instructor takes the time to explain what is happening and setting up the course very logically. The time spent going through the entire workflow is helpful to see how to go from an empty grey box, to a very nice looking cabin.

Plan on spending more than the allocated time in several lessons. Multiple times in the course, I found myself just playing with how the scene looked. This became my painting canvas. The end goal was a cabin by the lake, but it wasn't to be identical to the instructors (and mine is not). I found knowledge provided was wonderful to spark new ideas in how I could make the scene my own.

Future learning Goal¶

I did find that I need to learn more about rendering a scene in the future. My initial output was grainy. It looked compressed and I was a little saddened to see that environment that I spent so much time in look so...2005 in how it was output. I did manage to make it a little better. This is a three camera clip of my result.

The first 20 seconds is just a static shot from the side of the cabin. This shows off the fire pit, the background birds, fireflies and waterfall as well as the nice lighting from the sky. The other 40 seconds are split to show a few different areas in a quick flyby. I did this on my own because I wanted more than just a static shot.

High quality renders¶

One thing I did find is that by default, Unreal Engine renders with compression. I tried turning that off to see the results. I quickly learned that a 20 second clip will reach almost 4.5GB of storage space. I'm still new at this...but ouch. That's a lot of space for a longer cinematic. I'm not sure how to get a super high quality without that much space though.

I also couldn't figure out how to render it as a 4K video, instead of 1080p.

The first clip in high quality (1080p):

I'm happy with this one. Everything looks good. Even those birds. I learned during this course that I do NOT have the skill set of 3D sculpt. However, that's ok. Those birds are in the background. The animation on the wings works perfectly and they look like they belong.

The next clip is flying from the side, over the island that I put in the lake to break up the water. In this shot you get a better look at the waterfalls in the distance, the chance to see all four sides of the house and some more details on the roof and dock. If you look closely around the 12 second mark you can also see some floating rocks. This looks like some foliage that is "touching" the landscaping - in the very back - and didn't stay attached the the side of the landscape going into the water.

Finally the last clip in high quality is a fly over the lake. It starts by getting a good look at the waterfall (and some more floating rocks). It then flies through the fireflies crossing the river, and gives another look at the cabin and firepit. Finally it pulls back along the river to give a wide shot of the entire scene. A few things to point out - around the 14 second mark, you can see the mountain in the background floating above the landscape. I should have caught that, but I was more focused on keeping the cabin in the shot that I let the camera go to high and you can see a bit of level design that wasn't meant to be shown. Around the 16 second mark, as the camera pulls back, you can see the water texture start to change. I'm not sure what is causing that, but my guess is because of the lighting angles. I don't know how to fix it though.

Conclusion¶

I really liked this course. I went into it hoping to learn some water simulation, and instead learned about a whole lot more. I also made a pretty good water material.

I found the course to be well paced, excellently explained, and almost like an art class at times. The instructor taught you the techniques you should use to build the end result but didn't want you to copy. You made it your own.

If you have the time to spare (one of the downsides to this course is the length), as a beginner, you'll learn a lot.

Review of Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner's Course

2022-10-03T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Continuing on my journey to learn a little bit about Unreal Engine 5, I turned to Udemy again for a course I could take that would help to learn some more.

I settled on Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner's Course by David Nixon. I wanted to learn more than landscaping (like I did in the last course). This was a ten hour course and covered much more of Unreal Engine.

Course Overview¶

The end goal of the course was to create a very basic game. This would demonstrate building a level, adding materials, enemies, puzzles, victory conditions, and more. To me, this course was really two courses mashed into one.

Course One - Overview¶

The first part of the course and the majority of the content, was the practical overview of how everything works in Unreal Engine. The instructor went over individual sections - designing a level, setting up the player, collisions, audio and most importantly, blue prints.

These sections of the course were detailed and demonstrated how various settings would impact the overall project. Additionally, the instructor injected just enough (bad) puns to keep the content from getting boring. This portion of the course I found very useful.

Course Two - The Tutorials¶

The other part of the course was the hands on tutorials. At the start of the course, this is what I was looking forward to the most. Unfortunately, this is where I felt the course fell flat. The tutorials did their job and my video below demonstrates it was effective - I have a completed game (and I was cool to the kids for the minute and half it took them to beat it).

However, the tutorials are rushed. On the better laid out ones, its obvious that the voice over was recorded after the video because the vocal instructions get 2-3 steps ahead of what the video is showing. This makes following along difficult when these are literally just "click here, change this value" rapid fire instructions.

Additionally, many of the instructions provided are to set exact object dimensions or locations, with no explaination of why or how these were found. The end result is a project that works...but I am left wondering how certain dimensions were found. Was this done via guess and check? Did the instructor do fancy math to figure out where to place walls? Is there a systematic way that these could have been placed?

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to those questions. Instead, to follow along with the rushed tutorials, I typed in the same numbers as the instructor and have literally the same project as they do because of it.

Conclusion¶

This course was better than the previous one, but I still feel like it could have been so much better. The overview portions of the course were really good. Unfortunately, they didn't translate as well into the tutorial lectures. While the tutorials accomplished the goal of building a simple game, they left out so much content that would be useful to know. The tutorials moved quickly and felt more like checking off boxes to make a game instead of designing, debugging, or even just providing a little explaination on how or why certain decisions were made.

I recommend this course for the overviews provided. If you know going into it that the tutorials will get you the game I have below, without a lot of the design decisions behind it, then all the better. However, don't take this just for the tutorials. They are quick and lack context on why certain things are being done.

My game:

Review of Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners course

2022-09-20T11:45:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I have an idea for a game in my head. I've had it for a while, but I don't know anything about video game design. Unreal Engine 5 came out in April 2022. The demo looked amazing. The thought of my game continues to pop in and out of my brain over time. With my current free time, I decided to learn a little bit about how Unreal Engine works.

I turned to Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners, by Gavin Eisenbeisz on Udemy. My goal was to get a very basic understanding of how the tool worked and decide if I'd continue forward. I knew going into this that a 5 hour course wasn't going to be enough to learn everything of Unreal Engine, but hopefully it'd be enough to determine if I should learn more.

Course Overview¶

I am conflicted in how to properly evaluate this course. I have several complaints about the course (below), but it did meet my goal of getting me a basic understanding of how an aspect of the tool worked and I do want to continue learning how to use Unreal Engine.

But first, my concerns...

Version¶

The course was last updated in June of 2021. I mentioned about that Unreal Engine 5 came out in April 2022. The instructor is using an early access edition of Unreal Engine 5. This means the UI is slightly different, a few bugs exist - namely landscape material blend is black on the non-early access version of Unreal Engine 5, and a few options have been merged or moved in the full release.

This version difference isn't a deal breaker, but it does mean that quick clicks the instructor does on video don't align to the UI currently in use on version 5.0.3. They are in different locations or are renamed or simply merged into another option that isn't clear.

Instructor response¶

The instructor has not been responsive to students in the course. The landscape material bug has multiple discussion threads on the course Q&A section, but no response from the instructor. Students are clearly frustrated at the lack of response, and some have given up the course because they assume this bug prevents them from moving forward. Buried in the comments is a note from another student that this does not impact other areas AND the material will be useable when painting the landscape. Again, frustration.

There was plenty of good in the course though:

Landscape tooling¶

With a title of "Realistic Environment Design", it's not surprising that the course focused on building a landscape. Covering sculpting, texturing, decorating and a few small environment things like collisions and basic lighting, I was able to create an island. It's not going to win any awards for level design, but for a first time, I'm proud of it.

Plus, the kids now was to add "all the things" to my island.

Forgive the lack of true cinematics, and only 6 seconds of video...this wasn't covered in the course and I probably found an old way to do this manually, but here is my island.

Conclusion¶

I would not recommend Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners as your first introduction to Unreal Engine 5. The course is a year out of date and running on an early access version of the engine. However, if you know the tooling a little bit (or are willing to pause and Google a quick how to), the overview of the landscaping tools were useful for an introduction.

This course has increased my desire to learn a bit more about the engine. I don't think I'm close to starting my game, but I am looking forward to learning more about what this tool can do - and how I'd be able to take advantage of it.

Review of Go: The Complete Developer's Guide (Golang) course

2022-08-28T12:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Personally and professionally, I've started bumping into Golang more and more. I've been told that it's a good language to learn and know, but until recently I didn't have a lot of free time to dedicate to learning a new language. With my down time now, I figure it'd be a great chance to pick up a new skill.

So, I turned to Go: The Complete Developer's Guide (Golang) by Stephen Grider on Udemy.

Course Overview¶

This is a 9 hour course (plus an hour or two for three self paced assignments). It goes from nothing (what's Go?) through installation to writing way more than a simple Hello, World! Through out the lessons, the instructor is explaining what's happening and why, not just throwing code into the IDE and having you run it.

The course goes through two main projects, introducing new Go concepts along the way. The first is building a small program that deals out a hand in a card game. You learn about variables, functions, receiver functions, structs, slices, unit tests, pointers and more. Nothing feels overwhelming and it is a nice logical progression.

The other project is a web site status checker, which introduces goroutines and channels. These are very important concepts in the language and the example, while basic, is not contrived. It is very good at introducing there two features, showing common problems and how to properly handle them.

Throughout the course, the instructor made use of the official documentation and showed how someone new to the language should utilize it as well. This is an under rated skill and I hope that other engineers appreciate how useful it is to be able to read official documentation and not immediately go to Stack Overflow for an answer.

I do have a couple very minor complaints. First, the course is using a slightly older version of Go. In the version the instructor is utilizing the ioutil library is still in use. In the version I have installed, that has been deprecated. This led to a few IDE warnings, and a quick search to determine how to fix it. Once that was resolved though, it was simple enough to make the few changes needed locally.

My other small complaint is the relatively short lessons. I love bite sized lessons, but when a lesson is between 4 and 10 minutes and the first minute and last minute are spent summarizing the previous lesson and giving you and idea of what the next lesson will be, there is a lot of time spend reviewing.

Conclusion¶

I have some down time right now and plan on learning a few more items on my back log. Stephen Grider has a nice library of courses and several of them cover topics I'm interested in learning about. If they are set up the same way as this course, I think I'll get a lot out of each of those.

This course was a perfect introduction to Go. It covered the basics, assumed that students have some programming knowledge and related this "new" language to others you've probably utilized. It doesn't dig into the CS101 concepts, other than to briefly mention how certain things are done (declare variable, function syntax, etc) and instead focuses on the aspects that make Go unique and useful as a language.

Review of GitLab's 'How to Manage a Remote Team' Coursera course

2020-10-26T09:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I am a huge fan of GitLab - both the product and the company. As the largest all remote workforce, they are in an enviable position of being an expert on how to manage a team of over 1000 global employees without having an office. My current position puts me in charge of managing a global, remote, workforce as well but on a smaller scale.

When GitLab announced they were releasing a course on How to Manage a Remote Team on Coursera, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I want to expand my skill set as a manager of remote employees and the chance to learn some best practices from GitLab in this area was a good place to start.

Course Overview¶

The course is split up in to a four week set of lessons and covers about 11-12 hours of material.

Week 1 covers Remote Best Practices.
Week 2 covers Managing Remote Teams.
Week 3 covers Remote Adaption Processes for Organizations
Week 4 covers Culture and Values for Distributed Teams

The final task then is building a remote transition plan for an organization.

Overall, these were well done. The videos are presented by various GitLab employees and cover a variety of different aspects in each section. There are various readings assigned too. These provide a ton of information, especially The Remote Playbook.

There is some GitLab centric information provided and back patting, but it is done in a way that helps to show why certain things are needed - like open and transparent documentation. By the end of the course, you will know that GitLab has an open handbook for everyone to read and you will know why you should as well. This type of thing is expected and knowing that the instructors will do some back patting is important too.

The final project - building a remote transition plan - is peer reviewed. You are presented with a series of questions, which you answer with a short essay for each and using information presented during the course. When you are done, the last task you have is to peer review three of your cohort's projects.

Conclusion¶

This course was information dense and useful. The time estimate is off as the videos take only about an hour each week. Either I am a faster reader than I thought or they have overestimated the time it would take to read the weekly material. In either case, I estimate that I spent about 6 hours. It was also nice that, although the course is split into weeks, everything is available immediately upon completing the previous tasks.

I recommend this course to anyone who manages a team remotely or who is in the process of transitioning to remote work. COVID has given the entire world a crash course in remote work, but this course is a good way to handle and manage those newly remote workers effectively. It is also a good course to take if your company is planning on extending the work remote environment that 2020 has thrust upon you to last beyond this current pandemic.

GitLab has done a good job with this course.

Review of Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2019 course

2019-12-23T10:00:00-06:00

Introduction¶

One of my personal and professional goals for 2019 was to get a certification of some kind. That's a fairly broad requirement with no real reasoning behind it. I wanted to learn something and I wanted it to be helpful at work. As the year rapidly entered the last few months, I realized I not done anything to reach the goal.

After a brief talk with my management, it was decided that I should get an AWS certification. It'd help the company out with some work we are doing to become an AWS partner, and I'd get a certification that would be useful.

With a read goal, I set out to learn something. I started by finding Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2019 on Udemy. At the time I'm posting this entry, the course has been updated to be useful for 2020. It's always a good sign that the creator is continuously updating their materials. This course was created by Stephane Maarek, who also holds the certification that is being taught about.

Course Overview¶

This course is a 19 hour overview of most of AWS. At first I thought that length was excessive, but it turns out that 19 hours isn't enough. This course is focused only on the AWS products that you need to know for the DVA-C01 certification. There is...a lot to know.

The materials go through how to use AWS's free tier for almost all of the work needed for the course. The very few areas that can't utilize the free tier are explicitly called out, so you don't end up with surprise AWS bills.

I highly recommend you set aside the time to go through this course and the practice tests. Then, I recommend that you do it again. AWS has a ton of services with three letter names. You need to know how those work and interact with one another. You need to know how to troubleshoot them, set them up, and scale them.

One pass through this course wasn't enough for me. I don't blame the instructor though. I blame the expansiveness of the test.

The practice questions were very similar to what questions looked like on the real exam. The concepts that were covered were helpful in answering a few others.

Conclusion¶

If (when?) I go for the next level of certifications in Amazon, I'll be looking for more courses from this creator. The course is very well built, very hands on, and obviously updated to stay relevant.

In November, I took my exam and passed on the first try.

I have other professional goals for next year, but if I decide to go for another AWS certification, I'll be looking for another course by Stephane Maarek.

Review of Travis CI Tutorial Udemy course

2019-07-09T14:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Update: This course is no longer accepting enrollments.

I've written about Travis CI before. I've reported a bug that makes it fairly easy to see environment variables in Travis CI or even unintentionally transfer them if you transfer your repository. I build this blog using Travis CI. I've used Travis CI to set up an OpenShift application. SmokeDetector uses it to manage it's blacklists. In short, I have experience with Travis CI.

I was surprised when I saw a course being offered for free recently on Udemy that deals with Travis CI. Since it was free and only a couple hours long, I figured I'd give it a shot. I enrolled in the course.

This is my review of Travis CI Tutorial by Vaga Notes.

Course¶

This course starts with no instructor introduction, no explanation of what the course is about, or goals for the course. If you don't know what Travis CI is, don't expect to learn that here. You are expected to know what it is and what it does. Honestly, you should probably have used it before too.

All coding done for this course is gone in the GitHub web editor. This bothered me initially, but after thinking about it, not so much. Most of the "real code" needed for this course is simply editing the .travis.yml file and the instructor saves a lot of time by not dealing with git and GitHub more than necessary.

Unfortunately, I think that is going to be the last good thing I have to say about this course. The rest can be summed up with one word: Inconsistent.

The sound is inconsistent. From one lesson to another, the instructor goes from being whisper quiet at highest volume to so loud it hurts. The microphone being used picks up static and most annoyingly, the instructor keeps coughing into the mic. Sound within a lesson is also inconsistent. In one lesson - Lesson 13 "Build Stages" - it went from quiet to loud and back multiple times.

Testing of the course material was inconsistent. The instructor recording their videos an hour after they had done it the first time, in some cases. This short time between doing it the first time and recording it for the tutorial is seen in how the instructor handles unexpected delays and failing builds.

The presentation is inconsistent. On several videos, the instructor obviously spent time making an intro and outro for the lecture. It's a few second animation and sound effect that encapsulates the lesson. On others, they jump right into the material or awkwardly end the lesson. If the instructor had spent more time giving the course a unified look and feel through the entire course, it'd come across as more polished. Instead, it looks like it was thrown together haphazardly.

Which brings me to the content. This is also inconsistent. There are points where the instructor didn't have a script at worse and only high level bullet points at best. They mumble their way through an explanation or series of interface options. They live code - with typos - their way through set up. They navigate to GitHub using Google Search, but accidentally click to quickly and get a previous search result (that could have been embarrassing).

Along with the live coded examples and an after thought of an explanation of what each step means, there is very bad advice given in some locations.

The first example of this is setting up environment variables (see my post on Travis CI environment variables). While setting up the GitHub token, so that Travis can deploy GitHub Pages, the advice given is to "just give it all the access". NO! NO NO NO NO NO! NO!. Especially when combined with the next step they took, which isn't even described.

The instructor moves over to Travis CI from GitHub to put in the environment variable. They put in the name of the variable and the value. Then they change the "Display this value in build log" from the default "Off" to "On" and don't say why!.

Moments later a build is pushed, the Travis CI log is shown, and there is the GitHub token that had "all the access" displayed in the build log. Anyone can come along and use that token to do anything to your GitHub repository.

Final Thoughts¶

This course is now listed for $20. It's not worth it. Go find something on YouTube, look at another repository that is already using Travis CI or Google for an example. Any of those options are going to be more useful to you - and more consistent - than this course. With the bad sound, half finished video introductions, and horrible advice on token generation the only thing you'll be doing if you take this course is play with your volume constantly and learn the wrong way to set up environment variables.

This course feels like it was recorded while the instructor was home sick with a minor cold and got bored with their video editing software.

Review of Software Testing Masterclass (2019) - From Notice to Expert Udemy course

2019-05-14T15:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I do QA work for my job and love learning new things, techniques or ways of doing my job better. The Software Testing Masterclass (2019) - From Novice to Expert caught my eye during one of Udemy's many sales. This course is only five hours long so I figured it'd be a quick overview (and I'd be able to skip of the 'novice') part of the course. It was created by Ozan İlhan. Their Udemy biograph says they have been a professional software tester for the last 10 years.

Course¶

First things first, English is not the instructor's first language. In most of the course this is not a problem, but be aware that there are some grammatical things that may throw a native speaker. Normally, I wouldn't count this against the instructor, but they specifically call out in the course description:

All videos have hand edited subtitles. We spent many hours to correct all the subtitles to help you to have a smooth learning experience.

Unfortunately, those subtitles are exactly what was said, so the grammar issues are even more glaring.

The "high-quality sound" that boasted about in the course description doesn't seem accurate. Sound from one lesson to the next varies wildly. In one lesson it is difficult to hear the instructor and in the next they are super loud.

OK, on to the actual content.

I felt this course did not take the "to Expert" part of the name to heart. Much of the content was power point slides being read to the student. The "Novice" portion of the course was laying a groundwork for students to understand the different types of testing, software development life cycle, how to report bugs, and how to build test cases.

The instructor provided a template for bug reporting and test case checklists. I cringe a little bit because these are Excel documents, but I've worked in the corporate world and Excel is the hammer used to pound every nail. I've seen and used templates that look very similar. It's not flashy or "an app", but it is what's used "in the real world", even if I hated using it at the time.

I think the "Expert" part of the course is labeled "Advance Testing Concepts", which covers different types of tests in more detail. This covers, black box testing, smoke and sanity testing, reggression testing, risk based testing and a few others. Unfortunately, this is presented as Power Point slides again.

The last real content in the course is covering how to sign up for various things like GitHub, JIRA, TestRail and TestLodge.

Finally, the course ends with what feels like a bunch of advertisements for freelance testing services. There are very brief overviews of uTest, Testlio, and BugFinders.

Final Thoughts¶

Overall, I am disappointed in this course. I was really hoping the "Expert" part covered a bit more or even new methods. Unfortunately, everything here I've heard of and used at one point or another.

Additionally, I'm really disappointed that so much of the course was being read a Power Point presentation. I was hoping to see some testing frameworks in action to compare/contrast the benefits of one over the other.

Due to the over use of Power Point though, and the last part of the course feeling like plugs for various services, I can't recommend this course.

Review of Sanic - An Asynchronous Web Framework for Pythonistas Udemy course

2019-01-23T10:00:00-06:00

Introduction¶

At work we are starting to write version 2 of our API. As part of this new version, we're migrating from PHP to Python (hooray!). There are various technical reasons for this, but I am excited. My technical skills are much (much) better in Python. Part of this migration involved decided the framework we'd be using and after several internal discussions, we settled on Sanic. The first line of the documentation reads:

Sanic is a Flask-like Python 3.5+ web server that’s written to go fast.

Great! I used Flask at my previous job. To be clear, Sanic is not based on Flask, but it's API is Flask-like. Good enjoy to start with. With the framework set, and previous experience with a similar framework, I wanted to go through how Sanic works.

I turned to Udemy and the Sanic - an asynchronous web framework for Pythonistas course, created by Szabó Dániel Ernő.

Course¶

The course is roughly two hours long and consists of 20 tutorial videos. Each one is less than 10 minutes long. It covers a wide range of features available in Sanic. The instructor made their code available on GitHub. I never actually used the GitHub repository though. Instead, I followed along with the brief tutorials.

For me, this speaks to the instructor's ability to keep the lessons and code short and simple yet effectively show how a single feature works. By making the code easy enough to type and follow along, the lesson was more effective because I was doing instead of just reading code.

The first few lessons are a little rough, because the recordings stutter like the machine that was doing the recording wasn't powerful enough. After 5-6 lessons this clears up. It's a minor thing but I do feel it's something that should have been fixed before the course was posted. One other annoyance was that each lesson contains the same boiler plate code:

import sanic

app = sanic.Sanic()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host="localhost", port=8000)

The lesson code will then go after the app variable is defined. The problem with this boiler plate code is that the instructor types it out every single lesson. Again, this is minor and it makes each lesson self contained, but I think having this code already written and adding in the important, lesson specific code, would have made the lesson more succinct. It also would have prevented a few typos that the instructor made and had to spend time correcting.

Thoughts on the lessons¶

The lessons themselves were effective at teaching a single Sanic feature. Some were a little short and almost all of them lacked any complexity you'd find in a real application, but they were quick ways to show how a feature worked and didn't spend a lot of time doing more than that. Lessons covered a variety of things you'd expect a web framework to handle:

Request Parameters
Aliases
Listeners
Configuration
Middleware
Cookies
Streaming files
Logging
Class methodology
Blueprints
Request Types
Error handling

Ironically, in the error handling lesson, the instructor had an error in their code. This is great, because it helps to see how to troubleshoot errors that Sanic can throw. My issue is that the instructor left the time where he's looking at another monitor (probably reading documentation) in the video. I feel this time could have been removed and the troubleshooting steps still been effectively shown.

Final Thoughts¶

Overall, I was happy with this course. It's about two hours long and does a good job of showing various aspects of Sanic. I don't recall ever being pointed to the documentation, which is a little surprising, but it was easy enough to find. The course provides a good foundation of knowing what Sanic can handle. As of the time of this post, Udemy says there have been ten students that signed up for the course. That is low and the lack of Q&A is also a bit concerning. I don't know how responsive the instructor is to student questions.

If you have a few hours (and dollars, during a Udemy sale) to spare and wish to learn some basics about Sanic, this is a good course to take. If not, the GitHub repository contains all of the lessons you go over.

Review of Udemy's Docker Swarm: Beginner + Advanced

2018-10-31T15:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I recently found short two courses about Docker on Udemy there were listed as free by the author as they get ready to update the course. This is a review of Docker Swarm: Beginner + Advanced by Luke Angel. This is the second course I've reviewed by this author. The previous course was reviewed here.

I have a very basic idea of what the container/microservice architecture is designed to solve. I've never used it professionally or on personal projects. My experience is limited to reading articles about technologies such as Docker or Kubernetes and thinking that I'd like to try those out at some point in the future.

Course¶

This is another hour long course and promises "foundational knowledge" by the end of the course. I disagree with this.

The course starts with a lecture that is essentially an ad (almost in the form of a TV episode trailer) for the course. There are duplicate lectures, which seems to be a recurring problem based on the same issue in the previous course. Another problem that has carried over from the previous course is audio issues and inconsistencies.

This is not a beginner course, despite the name. The author assumes knowledge of Docker and does not explain concepts when the "demo" starts. Speaking of the "demo", this isn't a true demonstration of the product. Instead, the author provides a ZIP file of commands that are run and outputs of those commands. In the lectures, a few elements of the output are highlighted and explained. I didn't find this to be a useful demonstration.

Final Thoughts¶

This is a course that is several years old. It is not well put together, with multiple lectures being duplicated. Sound issues plague the presentation throughout the hour. These are all similar complaints to the previous course. This course also includes a demonstration, that is really just looking at the output of an attached text file. For a demonstration, I was expecting to be able to follow along, as as this is "Beginner + Advanced", I was expecting some kind of instructions on how to set up my environment. There is none.

I don't recommend this course (or the previous one) because of how little "useful" content is fit into these two hours.

Review of Udemy's Docker and Containers: The Essentials

2018-10-29T09:45:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I recently found short two courses about Docker on Udemy there were listed as free by the author as they get ready to update the course. This is a review of Docker and Containers: The Essentials by Luke Angel. There is a third free Docker course by the same author as well.

Course¶

This course is a one hour, very high level, overview of what containers are. The course description mentions that there won't be detailed developer examples, and this is true. My issue with the course is that it is to high level. This course is not for anyone with even a tiny idea of what a container is.

The author has basically created an hour long, narrated Power Point presentation. Even worse, there are at least two instances of lecture that are duplicated (and are pointed out in the community feedback and Q&A section). The narration is obviously edited from multiple microphones and the sound consistency is uneven. The author also spends lectures typing on their keyboard while talking. This is loud and distracting.

Motivational speaking makes it into one of the final lectures, explaining that we are winners for being on the right track by studying Docker.

Final Thoughts¶

This is a course that is several years old. It is not well put together, with multiple lectures being duplicated. Sound issues plague the presentation throughout the hour. The content of the course is accurate - as of a few years ago - but has areas that are outdated at this point.

I don't know how long the author is spending on updating their courses, but there is a lot that needs to be done in just this one hour course.

Review of Udemy's renamed The 2018 Git Complete: 45 minute crash course using Angular.

2018-10-01T09:45:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Update: This course is no longer offered on Udemy. There are more recent version and courses for a Git introduction.

I use Git extensively in both my personal and professional work. I've set up GitLab for my personal work. I know enough about Git to be effective in a small environment with a handful of developers. I found a 30 minute crash course about Git on Udemy and decided to take it with the goal of learning a little bit more.

The course I found was The 30 minute crash course to learning GIT 2 by Ricardo Morales.

Spoiler: I rated this course poorly on Udemy and since that rating, the course name has been changed to "The 2018 Git Complete: 45 minute Crash Course using Angular". The course has been updated slightly to add 15 more minutes of content since I completed the course. I have watched those as well and have not changed my rating.

Course¶

When I took this course it was definitely incomplete. The very first lesson starts with "In our previous lecture...". Obviously, as the first lecture, there isn't a previous one. The 15 minutes of new content does add a few introduction lectures before this, so it's not as jarring, but the order of lectures is still out of order. There are next instances of "In the next lecture I'll cover..." and then the next lecture is something else, or "In the last lecture we talked about..." and the mentioned topic was a few lectures ago.

The course is a very quick run down of common Git commands. Very quick. Most lessons are under a minute in length. What this means is that there is almost no explanation about the command you're about to learn. In most of the lectures, it's a quick reading of the command's "help" sentence, then typing the command in a terminal window to show the syntax. Unfortunately, there isn't an over all project and the order of the lectures is out of order, so it's difficult to see how a particular command actually works since there isn't any set up done ahead of time.

One example of how this is poorly demonstrated is in the lecture on renaming a file. The example uses mv to rename a file, talks about how it's been renamed, and then uses mv to rename it back to the original name to that there "won't be problems with Git." The entire point of the lecture is to show how this should be accomplished and this lecture misses it's mark entirely.

Another example is in the lessons on handling merge conflicts. This is an important topic because conflicts need to be handled when multiple developers are working on the same thing. The lecture on handling these though talks about the theory of handling it but doesn't provide a demo. The same thing is done in the topic on rebasing.

Minute long lectures are not a good format. The lessons are rushed to the point where there is almost no content. Reading the "help" sentence and then showing the syntax doesn't make this a crash course. It makes it an audio/visual help document.

Final Thoughts¶

If you know anything about Git, avoid this course. If you don't know anything about Git, I'd avoid it too, unless you prefer listening to help documents instead of reading them. There isn't any novel content here. Examples are lacking, at best. Lectures are out of order and when I took it, missing entirely. The newly renamed course to include "using Angular" is incredibly misleading. Angular is used only to generate a project that can be committed to Git. Nothing done here uses Angular other than generating that project.

If you know anything about Git, there is nothing here you don't know.

The completion award below reflects the name of the course before it was renamed.