MongoDB Final Exam

Officially answered the last question to my “final exam” for my MongoDB online course. It’s been an interesting 7 weeks, and I’m pretty proud to have stuck it through all the way to the end.

A few of us at work embarked on taking the course together – but gradually folks had to bow out, due to time constraints. The time needed for the videos and the homework ended up being a little more than most bargained for, and by the end only two of us actually ended up completing the whole thing.

As a whole, I’m glad I did take the course – though I wish there would have been more coding (like what we did in the early weeks), as opposed to some of the performance aspects in the later weeks. Great that I now know things like sharding and failover scenarios, but I don’t expect to be the guy handling those kinds of issues.

Still, it’s nice to have had this (free) chance to get a bit more familiar with MongoDB. I did fine on all the homework assignments, and just got done with the final exam today – so I’ll now tomorrow how I did in the course.

The Final exam was made available in the last week of the course (Week 7). Sadly, though I’ve kept up with all the overviews… I did not finish this week’s videos. It’s akin to having the finish line at the 4K mark in a 5K race. I kind of got done, and lost steam.

The last week focuses a bit more on Express/Jade, which I’ve always been a bit interested in but never really worked with. I may end up finishing the videos this week, just because now that I’m thinking about it… the obsessive completist in me is getting twitchy.

I’ll be curious to see if there are any additional courses available, related to MongoDB. The big draw here, from my perspective, is the notion of permanence. As somehow who works a lot with requesting and retrieving data, the idea of being able to dictate what that data is, and also how it’s stored/retrieved is kind of a new perspective. And opens up a lot of possibilities.

The big win for me (in addition to just completing the course) is that these last few weeks have really been the first time I’ve taken on a sustained learning approach. Though it wasn’t every day, I made progress on a new topic week to week.

I’ve learned new things mostly through either projects at work, or working on personal projects on my own time. What I haven’t really done is sit down and studied something, as a thing unto itself. I need to think back on my experience with this course, and figure out how to build in a regular, consistent study program for myself.

Even if it’s just reading X pages per day on a topic, I feel I need to carve that time out – and stick to it. Whatever the topic, whatever the amount – I just need to make learning new things into a new habit.

Related:
MongoDB for Node.js Developers: Free Online Course
Code Day