Week 1 of 12 : Testing Phase

#devjournal

This week was me "dipping my toe" in the pool to see the basic adjustments I'll need in order for my 12-Week Year to be successful.

Goal 1 - Pass the Google Cloud Digital Leader Exam
Goal 2 - Complete Powershell Mastery Program
Goal 3 - Complete as many days as possible in the 100 Days of Python challenge (this starts after I pass my exam)

My daily habits are (Mon - Fri) :

Complete 4 PowerShell lessons
Practice learned Powershell commands for 15 minutes
1 hr of studying for the Digital Leader exam

So, how did I do?

According to the math, I was around 53.3% successful.

The breakdown:

I studied 4 hours for my Digital Leader Exam
I completed 4 Powershell lessons total for the week (so that counts as one day)
I practiced PowerShell for 15 minutes, 3 days this week

What went right

Exam Pro

I wish I'd listened to one of my friends earlier and chosen the Exam Pro Digital Leader course over Google's videos. I decided to simply go along with the videos Google Cloud provided, which were incredibly informative, but as far as testing what I learned, a 10-15 question quiz after each section (4 to 8 or so videos) isn't enough to cement the knowledge given.

You can watch the videos for free, and of course, the paid version gives practice exams and such if you feel you need it. But the videos were more than enough for me because of how well they explained the concepts.

15-Minute PowerShell Practice

15-minute drills were perfect for my busy days at work, and when I didn't feel like practicing, I told myself, "It's only 15 minutes, so let's just knock it out." 2 out of the 3 times, I extended my lessons due to questions I had (more on that later).

Using AI As A Tutor

When practicing PowerShell, I prompted CoPilot to be my PowerShell tutor to help me actively recall what I've learned for the day. CoPilot came up with practice exercises for me to complete and congratulated me on a successful round or corrected me and explained why my syntax was incorrect. What I loved best about this experience is that CoPilot also showed me more efficient ways to obtain the result needed, so I not only had practice, but it helped fine-tune my skill.

For the Google Cloud Digital Leader Exam, I copy and pasted my notes and saved them as sources in Google NotebookLM. I then used the chat feature to have NotebookLM create a quiz based on specific sections from my notes.

While the quiz provided brief explanations for wrong answers, I used the chat feature to dive deeper into the 'why' and build my confidence.

What went wrong

In one of my practice sessions, I spent more time arguing with CoPilot than on practicing my lesson for the day. The homework was from the PowerShell Mastery class, in which my instructions were to create 10 log files as "log1, log2, etc..." up to log10. The next step was to compress files log1 to log5 into a zip file using brackets as a wildcard.

Compress-Archive -Path Desktop\log[1-5].txt -DestinationPath Documents\FirstHalf.zip

I was successful with log1-log5 but resulted in an error when I attempted to compress log6-log10. Immediately, I knew it was related to 10 being two digits, but I wanted confirmation. I used my old friend Google, but it came up with overcomplicated scripting solutions that I didn't ask for, so I turned to CoPilot, who replied that there was no way to grab it! I told CoPilot that I'd grabbed and compressed log1-log5, so there's definitely a way to get it done, and I even provided a screenshot as proof. It told me in so many words, "Thanks for the screenshot, but you didn't actually grab log1-log5."

I felt gaslit to hell, so I expanded the zip file and saw log1-log5 was indeed in the zip. It was then that it clicked for me that although AI is incredibly useful, the scope of its usefulness is highly dependent on the context provided. I explained every step in detail and asked why am I unable to grab log6-log10.

It "understood" and explained why, along with a simple solution.

Compress-Archive -Path Desktop\log[6-9].txt , Desktop\log10.txt -DestinationPath Documents\SecondHalf.zip

_In case you're curious about the why, [6-10] fails because PowerShell doesn't really see 10 as an actual number. It reads the command as "6,7,8,9,1 or 0" instead of 10. _

Screen Time

It's incredibly inaccurate! If you take a look at the time spent in apps for last week Tuesday, you can see my time in apps is significantly lower than what my iPhone is saying. When I searched for a reason for why this is, basically the iOS counts anytime the screen lights up, which corrupts the screen time data since my phone gets a million and one notifications. Another issue is, even though I place my phone on it's charging stand, the lock screen is on, but the screen is still lit. It's still a relief that I can see an incredible difference in my phone use!

Week 2 Goals: