The Writing Prompt for 2023

We’ve all been really short on spoon the last couple of years and I’m not convinced it’s going to get a lot better so I am working on motivating myself to write. The local UG is sadly no more and I need to find some thing to write (and eventually speak) about to fill the void left in my heart. I’ve bounced a few ideas around and decided that instead of trying to find something I’d start with a problem I had at hand. (But not work challenges: those are currently just frustratingly sad.)

So I have for the last few years been tracking my reading and I’d like to do some more analysis of what I’ve recorded. It’s a mostly solved problem I just haven’t done the work for yet so I can write it up as I go through it. Here are some of the things I think it will drive me to touch on in the coming year:

• data normalization as I take the data from my google sheet and break it out into entities that are appropriate for a database.
• setting up a database development environment in Azure Data Studio.
• Finding and scraping extra data from web sources.
• Playing with data in PowerBI (I might do something interesting here but honestly if that’s the sort of thing you really want right away there are far better people to follow than me.)
• deployment pipelines (I don’t have a great home lab for this but maybe?)
• other things that come up in the course of working my brain around this problem and project as they come up.

So that’s the plan, this weekend I will get my first post together that presents what limited reading data point I’ve collected and how to start turning those into relational entities.