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Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu

Short-lived Canpages Writing Gig

I provide writing/blogging services for Helium Content Source (https://www.heliumcontentsource.com) and the latest assignment was to write short 300-500 word articles for Canpages, advertised as Canada’s fastest growing local search company. Helium uses a great dashboard for article submissions, edits, and approvals. Canpages uses WordPress for the blogging platform and when articles are approved at Helium, a second set of edits and approvals happen at Canpages. I was able to get 4 articles published at Canpages before the assignment came to an end for me. Here are the published articles, and they are tailored to Vancouver -centric stories in lifestyle, entertainment, and restaurants linked below. https://blog.canpages.ca/blog/?author=72 If the link becomes stale, here is a graphic I am always looking for more writing/blogging opportunities so if my writing style appeals to your needs, please contact me at info at aminsolutions dot com.

Notes on Freelance Camp 2011- Contracts For People Who Hate Contracts (Session#1)

This past weekend I was at the Freelance Camp held by TheNetworkHub at New Westminster https://thenetworkhub.ca/freelancecamp. There was a lot of energy at that “unconference” and I left feeling very motivated. I didn’t know that “unconference” meant no set agenda for the day until one was created by participants themselves. Speakers would line up and have a maximum of 30 seconds to pitch their session. If the session gets voted on, it will become one of the sessions offered that day. Some of the sessions I attended include: (Session#1) Contracts; (Session#2) What Clients/Consultants Really Think?; (Session#3) How to Write a Book; (Session#4) Rules of Engagement; and (Session#5) 6 Time Management Tips. I will have separate posts for each of these to ensure it is legible and easier to digest. Contracts – by Danielle Lemon and Martin Ertl This one was popular and one I immediately signed up for. Danielle and Martin talked about many reasons for having contracts. -Contracts a

Company Wordpress blog is down at 110mb

Our hosting provider at 110mb recently moved their servers to Newfoundland and Labrador and this has broken our website at http://www.aminsolutions.com. The outage started this Sunday April 25, 2010 and its is still unresolved. I believe the web servers are now active and working because I can see my files. However, our blog uses Wordpress which relies on 110mb's MySQL server, which apparently is the last piece that is down. I don't have any issues with 110mb as a hosting provider and I understand this to be a technical issue so I appreciate that it may take a few days. I just hope all my databases are still intact as I haven't run recent MySQL backups. If it takes longer than a week, I'll activate this blog as my primary site and point www.aminsolutions.com to it.