My new course Mastery with SQL is out now!

I'm so thrilled with how it's turned out. My goal when I set out was to build a course that's exercise-centric. I'm an avid learner who loves studying new domains, and in my experience one of the best ways to really learn a new topic is via exercises and practice, not just passively sitting back and watching videos or reading. But creating great exercises - exercises that match the content, are grounded in real-world problems, provide a challenge but are not too difficult - is hard. In creating my course, I estimate about half of my time was spent thinking about and creating exercises and then revising them based on feedback.

Mastery with SQL ships with over 140 exercises, and I think some of the happiest moments I had creating this course - those moments when I got a little buzz and felt great about what I was doing - came when I had that ah-ha moment designing an exercise.

So what's next? I have a couple of updates I want to make to the course and several chapters I'd still like to add. I'm working on a chapter now covering how to use views and functions. And I'd also like to add some more "bonus" chapters on query performance, indexes, and transactions. I added a GitHub Page to keep track of all the additions/changes to the course and I'll also be emailing existing customers as new chapters are added or any other major additions are made. There's some other niceties I want to add also - stuff like course completion certificates, a SQL cheat sheet, etc. I might even add some more exercises.

I also want to build more courses and building this course has helped crystalize in my mind how I want to build courses going forward and what makes my courses unique. If I were to try to summarize what I think that is, it's "Being Hands-On". The topics that are near and dear to my heart - Databases, data engineering, distributed systems, data visualization, and Python will all be the nexus of upcoming courses.

I'm also blogging. Again. I've had so many different blogs over the years but something tells me this will be the one that sticks around for good this time.