STG's

Acabei o curso do Clube FII - Fundos Imobiliários: Um Jeito Inteligente de Investir em Imóveis. O curso tem cerca 10 horas de vídeo, mais um e-book de 277 páginas (mas com estilo de slide show, então muitas páginas só tem 1 linha de texto com fonte enorme). Achei o conteúdo interessante no geral, e com partes bem práticas, com demonstrativo de como comprar e como analisar alguns fundos. A parte que não gostei foi a específica de cada setor e a de value investing - bem curtinhas, as do curso do Expert XP foram melhores. O curso tem um certificado, verificável online e que você pode imprimir. Achei o custo benefício, tanto do valor (R$160, mas peguei dois descontos - aniversário do clube E de ser membro) e do tempo (8h, acelerando bem os vídeos - ambos professores falam relativamente devagar), muito bom. Claro que isso depende dos valores que você tem/quer colocar em FIIs.

 Relacionamento interpessoal e gestão de conflitos   é um curso do LIT/Saint Paul. Sinceramente achei que ia ser meio inútil, no final achei interessante. Alguns temas - comunicação, percepção, feedback, formação e desenvolvimento de equipes, gestão de conflitos. Evidentemente que trabalhando sozinho de casa, boa parte do conteúdo não é útil, mas no contexto de uma empresa acredito que teria ótimo efeito se todos entendessem o conteúdo. Uma das leituras extras foi esse artigo , que fala de uma técnica para evitar conflitos. Não tem dados, mas desconfio que bem implementado faria muita diferença em organizações.

Critical Thinking for Better Judgment and Decision-Making is an interesting course on LinkedIn Premium.  It covers many ways to improve your critical thinking, and what disrupts it. It talks about logical fallacies, how to enhance your planning, using mental models, enhancing your questions and more. Overall, pretty useful for the short length (about an hour).

 Jetbrains Academy teaches programming in a practical manner, using projects. Currently they have tracks for Java, Python, Kotlin and Frontend development. You can use the browser or their IDEs, with a plugin - which of course is nicer and faster. Not to mention that if you are going to use them afterwards, that is practice on mastering them. It seems nice so far. You can skip classes for the projects by taking exercises/tests, and the classes so far were all in text format, which I personally like. This is not free, though. You get a free trial (14 days, +2 months if you complete your first project), then it is US$50 a month or US$250 for the year.  It does seem to be more effective in relative narrow ranges (I didn't take any more complex projects yet), but you can get a year of Pluralsight for that, which includes a lot of courses, and some interactive projects, too. If you'd like to try them, you can use this link  for a 3 month trial. I get gems if you do, which can ...

 Building your first machine learning solution, by Mohammed Osman, on PluralSight, covers the basics of machine learning. Since I already had that on other courses, I watched this one mostly for completeness of the Machine Learning Literacy path on Pluralsight. Mostly it wasn't helpful, but I did like seeing the demos with Google Collab, which I hadn't used before. In particular, I was impressed by how easy it was to create an API with it.

 Método Ágil: Scrum, Kanban, outras metodologias e Toolkit é um curso do LIT/Saint Paul. Como diz o nome, ele fala de metodologias ágeis, especialmente do Scrum e do Kanban. Já falei um pouco do LIT no último review de curso, mas achei que esse foi melhor: - vídeos são um pouco melhores, com mais tempo mostrando tela. - tutores interagem mais. - aula foi um pouco mais prática. Eu tinha feito um curso recente de Kanban , e lido sobre o Scrum, mas achei que o enfoque foi interessante e que aprendi bastante coisa. A avaliação final foi um estudo de caso sobre empresas que usaram agile. Meu tempo final foi de cerca de 7h.

 Exploring Lean Principles, by Chris Behrens, is a PluralSight course. It covers a number of lean principles, including their origin, and ways to apply them in coding. Overall, very much worth the hour or so it takes to watch it.

 Criatividade, Inovação e Empreendedorismo é um curso do LIT, a plataforma online do Saint Paul. Naturalmente, o post vai ser em português (o que é bem raro nesse blog), por motivos evidentes. Também vai ser um misto de review do curso e do LIT. Em teoria a carga horária é 20h, mas desconfio que fiz em bem menos (desenvolvi meu software em que anoto horas para minha época de consultor - e não adicionei uma categoria para o curso). Porém, a maioria das aulas fica ótima em 1.5x (0.5-2x no software, a extensão que uso para isso também funciona). A qualidade dos vídeos é OK, 360p. Infelizmente, o enfoque da câmera é tipo antigo - professor de corpo inteiro com tela no fundo. Isso significa que parte do tempo ele está apontando para a tela mas não dá para ler direito. Na maioria dos casos tem zoom para tela eventualmente. O curso tem apostilas em PDF, baixáveis. As notas são as seguintes - 20% para os fóruns, 30% para avaliação individual, 50% para avaliação final. As que são manuais de...

 Entrepreneur Foundation, by Kim Kaupe, is a course on LinkedIn Learning - which I decided to try out. First of all, LinkedIn Learning - so far it is ok. There are a few annoying UI choices (reviews are stars only, no text, and are not displayed on the main search; it can't remember video speed), but overall it works well, both web and the android app. Selection of courses is pretty OK, covering many fields (programming, graphics, business, etc). Most courses have certificates you can add to LinkedIn profile with a click. Price in Brazil is very, very good - something like US$5 per month, with a discount for annual. About the course - the instructor is very pleasant, and I loved her work in Psych (just kidding, but in some angles she looks a lot like Juliet, and even sounds like her). Since it is an hour long course, there isn't much content. It is more like a long article. Still, well worth the time.

Build Your Own CLI Planner App Using Python Abstract Base Classes, by Nicolae Caprarescu, is a project in the Core Python path in PluralSight. There were some things I didn't know about, for sure, including how to force issubclass to see protocols (which, BTW, as a fan of strong typing seem horrifying), and the various weird ways to do abstract classes in Python. The approach of having the whole project in a single block is a little annoying, too, but not a major problem. Time seems wildly wrong here. They predict 3 hours. Took me 50 minutes. And I am not that good in Python. This was the last item on the Core Python path for me.  I also took their SkillIQ test and got 92%, which seems very nice (and very unrealistic).

Advanced Generators and Coroutines is the final course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight (I still got a project to do, though) This seemed way more confusing than necessary. Also, since I just took a course on Async programming in C#, I can't help but draw parallels, and to me it seems like C# wins handily in this case...

Managing Python Packages and Virtual Environments, by  Reindert-Jan Ekker, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. Virtual environments are a solution to the Python version of DLL hell, which seems to be a common pattern among all languages (Delphi, my previous favorite language, did have the advantage of just having everything in the EXE - but you still got it in the IDE, and I don't recall having a solution at the time if you needed several versions of things - just reinstall/rename and re-run the IDE).  I have been using them, mostly by the way PyCharm handles them automatically, and the course was pretty useful to understand what is actually going on.

Decoding Sensor Data Using Python, by Hugo Valle,  is another project in the PluralSight Core Python Path. Their way to check projects is interesting. Basically, you fork a repo in github, tell them your github name, and they will test what you did after you push the code. This was pretty useful, but in a limited way - you mostly just do what you are told, such as adding methods to a class, and adding that exact call. So what you learn is much more limited than just telling you to do something. Yet more useful than the last, as it had some different stuff to do. Some bits were pretty much "type this", but I guess they were easier than students mismatching their exact formatting. There were some bits on the descriptions that referred wrong variables, as well as unit test instructions mismatched with the description (strptime vs strftime), but nothing too hard to fix.

 Python Best Practices for Code Quality, by  Reindert-Jan Ekker, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. This one cover PEP8 - which I thought was silly, but after programming a while in Python I actually like how the code looks - , generating documentation from docstrings, and type hinting. The most interesting bit was the type hinting, as I am a big fan of static typing (which I feel saves typing, btw, as the compiler can tell what you can be passing).

 Core Python: Hashing and more Collections, by Jon Flanders, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. This covered hashing and equals to use custom classes in mapping collection (covered elsewhere in the path, although here it was much more clear), as well as a few utility class I was not aware - Defaultdict, Counter, Namedtuple and Deque. Video was a little bad at spots, though, which I don't recall seeing recently on PluralSight.

Core Python: The Numeric tower, conversion and operators, by Matt Harrison, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. This covered the user of int, float, decimal, datetime, and fraction. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that sounds a lot like Core python: numeric types, date and time (except for the date and time), and most of the content was similar. At this point it should be obvious that I'm only adding the reviews here for the sake of completeness.

Unit Testing with Python, by Emile Bache is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. Very nice. I am a big fan of unit testing - in a big part because before I started using it, my code quality was much worse, not so much because of bugs, but mostly because of way to many dependencies.

Build a Personal Budget Report with Python Collections and Iterables is a project in PluralSight, part of the Core Python Path. My opinion is just the same as on the previous course - you do learn stuff, but since you are mostly not supposed to think - just type their english into code - it is not that much. I can't help but imagine that a lot of the course could be generated with some heuristics, just reformatting the code as english. Still, somewhat useful. It doesn't take a lot of time, either.

Core python: numeric types, date and time, by Austin Bingham and Robert Smallshire, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. This covered the user of int, float, decimal, datetime, and fraction. At this point it should be obvious that I'm only adding the reviews here for the sake of completeness. In this one I viewed part in a FireTV. It worked well. I did miss taking screenshots, though (photos work, but you can't pause or the UI covers it).

Core Python: Instrospection, by Austin Bingham and Robert Smallshire, is another course in the Core Python learning path in PluralSight. This mostly covered, as obviously for the name, several techniques for instrospection of classes and objects.