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
This is a followup to a previous post in the summer of 2011, about how important customer service is to the health of a business relationship. Just recently, our most loyal client since 2004 has just announced that they would like to postpone or hold-off on monthly managed IT services in the “short-term” while server upgrades are performed by their other IT provider back east. They are also looking at options for an offsite server, possibly outsource their email infrastructure and sign up for SaaS provider. They are starting to use a lot of mobile devices to do a lot of their work, including Blackberries and Android tablets so their datacentre is changing. It’s unfortunate that we will not be involved in transitioning their infrastructure. I hope the GM calls after the dust settles so that we can continue with our business relationship. My single most important advice to others is to frequently and continuously revise your customer service strategy.