Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Project Management Starts

I am looking forward to this class since I have worked with alot of project managers and would like a better understanding of what they did. They recommended it to me as a career but I was unsure if a) I could do the work and b) if it was something I would enjoy doing for the next 20 or so years. I, of course, was sent the wrong version of the text and will not receive it until Wed or Thurs but at least I will have it in time to contribute in my group this week. I am also nervous about the workload since this is the first of the 4 week courses. I hope I will be able to keep up.

Monday, October 13, 2008

End of Class Post

We are in the last week of school and I have learned more than I thought I could about systems design and database management. I really had a hard time with the SQL program and getting all the different comands and constraints down. It really reminded me alot of using DOS before the creation of Windows, where you had to have a command for everything you wanted to do, or maybe more like HTML, since it is all about scripts. I guess that is how long SQL has been around but I don't think it would kill the program to make it a little more user-friendly. If I took an intensive, attended class on it, I could probably get a grip on it but I don't plan on doing any database administration for a long, long time.
System design and administration was easier for me to keep up with and have a better understanding. I do have a (very) little experience with that but I was able to take that experience and tie it into dataflow management for an office and make it work for me. Flowcharting information for an office seems to me, at least, to be very similar. Getting into the specifics for lines and shapes and one-of-one/many endings was a little confusing but re-reading and using Visio made it easier to figure out. I could see myself getting involved in that type of work alot more than anything doing with databases, that's for sure. Overall I got tons of exposure to information I would never have had otherwise, so the class really accomplished what I was hoping for.