Tale of two MOOCs( Massive Open Online Courses):

MOOCs have started for courses from Universities some time back and I have used the one from Stanford for iOS development. Thanks Prof. Hegarty – If I had to do it again, I won’t necessarily do it in the same way ( it turned out to be very inefficient for a beginner who has a day job doing something else). The course definitely is good but has a relatively steep learning curve. It starts to get difficult if you have a day job.I found books more helpful to learn the fundamental concepts of Objective C.

However, it seems that the time has finally arrived for companies to start offering MOOCs for their development platform. Being in the SAP world, I have enrolled and finished the following:

From SAP:

– Introduction to Software Development on HANA : This was the first one from open.sap.com and it helped that it’s for HANA – the cool kid in SAP world these days.The course was well structured and the fact that it had practical tips on how to fire up AWS instances, create AMIs to save costs etc was very helpful. It was more HANA general rather than focusssed on ABAP on HANA.In the beginning it was a bit challenging ( especially week 2) but then it picked up a very good pace and I enjoyed working through it. Apart from HANA, the biggest message was – Ignore JS at your own peril.

-Mobile Development on SAP Platform : I have already worked on a project for an iOS application using SMP, supported it around for a year and have learnt a great deal about the differences between a mobile application development project compared with traditional application development projects.This course still proved to be very useful for couple of reasons:It had SAP Netweaver Gateway providing services in oData protocol for the backend.The course was more for developers who’re already able to build mobile applications and it’s focus was on presenting SMP as a MEAP that can be used for enterprises. I’m satisfied with this course.

– HANA Cloud Development : I have been doing a lot of Java development, especially in the last 3 years and I was happy to see JEE skills being useful here. The course creates a typical JEE application but using SAP HANA Cloud as a platform. I’m mid way through the course and have learnt some new things – e.g. document management service in a cloud application. I see cloud as the platform for future. Not only in SAP but also outside it – redhat is pushing for it’s ESB on cloud.

From MongoDB University:

I have signed up for MongoDB for Node.js developers course from MongoDb University. There are two things that I’m learning in the course.

– ALl my life has been with relational databases. This is the first time I’m doing any kind of work with a non relational database. Initially I found the idea very weird – what happened to schema ? However, thinking about iterative development – it doesn’t turn out to be a bad idea at all. In some ways, the schema is in the application and a collection ( entiity in the SQL world) can have different kind of data co-existing – before and after a patch to add a new field as an example.

– Node.js : I have done the pluralsight course but it’s good to apply it for a practical blog application.