Re: Looking for an online mentor

On Thu, 8 Dec 2016 19:19:27 -0500
Metare Solve <solvemetare(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Sorry, I got on so many lists yesterday. I'm really not that dense.
>
> I have absolutely no language programming skills and it is very very
> frustrating. I can HTML and that's it. I desperately want to develop
> the skills but whenever I try on my own, I hit the same wall as I do
> with SQL. I'm just bad at the deep dives into code and really need
> some honest help.

I've written two books on Rapid Learning. You can learn this stuff, and
learn it a lot faster than most people think you can (depending on your
beliefs), but please understand you're not going to be proficient at
several programming languages and SQL and Postgres in two weeks. What
you're trying to do requires you to make a real committment over a much
longer time than a couple weeks, and you should not delay further
employment until you've learned programming, SQL, and Postgres.

[snip]

> The reason I think I can learn SQL with just a bit of
> guidance is I know the concepts behind "where" and "group buys" and
> "unique," etc, but I miss a ; and get an error and then get
> frustrated.

Remember above I mentioned your beliefs as an energizer or retardant to
your learning? If errors get you frustrated, you must either change
your beliefs to believe that errors, even those caused by a silly
syntax mistake like a missing ';', are just part of the process: Fix
them and move on. If you cannot adopt that belief, you'll never succeed
in programming of any kind. Fortunately, most beliefs are fairly easy
to change.

>
> Purpose of the project:
>
> Eh, a bunch of things.
>
> - The project is to build my Tableau

[snip]

> - The project will also give me a product [snip] portfolio.

[snip]

>
> - I have two projects, one of them is to analyze crime rates around
> the moon phases. Just a question my dad once posed as a science
> project that I blew off. Now seems kind of interesting to me to
> pursue. Will give me date experience, mapping if I want it, can go
> down to the precinct level, etc. The other is some data I've been
> collecting for about 15 months on a pixel dragon game I play. I want
> to build a dashboard to manage my lair/income/value, etc. That is
> definitely where the SQL database comes in. I think the moon one is
> just data blending.

I doubt that crime rate analysis and a dragon game will give you
sufficient motivation for the large amount of work that will be
required to learn all of this.

>
> - To give me intellectual stimulation because I am a nerd.

Yeah, that'll do it.

>
> Just a note, I'm a female gen x with a master's degree in library and
> information science. I took a database design class in grad school
> and it was the biggest waste of money and time.

A whole heck of a lot of college courses are a waste of time. I'm
writing a series of books related to this right now.

I think you need to decide how serious you are about this. If you're
serious enough to make the committment it requires, please keep me in
the loop. Also, as somebody else already mentioned in this thread, if
you're serious about it, revise your email communications to answer
specific questions right below the questions, and delete any context
material not closely related to what you're writing back. Top posting
is great for corporate communication, where the priority is CYA. But
it's a lousy way of conducting question/answer/question/answer type
communication: You need interleave posting with scrupulous snipping of
unrelated material for that.

SteveT

December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21