A Matter Of Degree

Time Travel V1, and how we can all contribute to the effort

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA; TRAFFIC. STOP AND GO SIGNS - 1913 - Harris & Ewing,, photographer, from the LOC on Flickr

 

Whenever the "which superpower would you choose?" question comes up, I pick time travel.  I often wish I could visit places as they were in the past - e.g. my own street, the town where I live, the places where my family members grew up, and sites where I'm traveling as a tourist.  It would be so amazing to flip through different time periods for a single site - like Rod Taylor when he's sitting in his time machine.  

Today I learned that there is a team at Google working on this concept, with the goal of delivering a day-in-the-life time-travel experience through AR.

They've just released phase one, a browser-based toolset called rǝ (pronounced as re”turn"), an open source, scalable system running on Google Cloud and Kubernetes that can reconstruct cities from historical maps and photos.  

The great news is that the system is open to all.  Got maps or old photos and need a COVID project?  Here are some things we all can do to contribute to this effort:

• upload historical maps
• georectify/warp maps that are already in the system
• trace georectified maps (e.g. drawing a building footprint, entering/correcting textual information such as its address, number of floors and so on) – or do this without having an underlying map
• upload and annotate images with buildings in them
• spread the word about the project

The complete suite of crowdsourcing tools is available online today to anyone in the world to go in and make a contribution, however large or small, to the project.  The more information and images we can gather about a place, the better the reconstruction will be, and the better experience we'll be able to have as we stroll down the streets of a city or beloved hometown in the past.

 

The team is also seeking partnership with institutions (libraries, archives, museums) that would have relevant materials and/or shared interests.

 

Read the official announcement about the project

Learn about how to contribute to the project

Thank You, Microsoft

 

It's hard for me to believe, but after five years and five months with Microsoft, I'm starting a new chapter today.

I wanted to take this time and space to say Thank You, Microsoft, for so many things.  Here are just a few of the ways you influenced my life and career for the better.  Thank you - 

• For giving me the opportunity to meet with so many different global companies, to learn about their businesses, and to work to solve their challenges.  I learned so much through my conversations with customers and visits to their offices.  Manufacturing plant tours have been one of my absolute favorite parts of my job.
• For providing me with an enduring network of smart, talented, passionate colleagues. 
• For being a company I was proud to work for, and really living up to the mission of empowering and enabling.
• For letting me indulge my passion for data by earning a Data Science Certificate, for free, as part of the Microsoft Professional Program pilot in 2016.
• For consistently supporting employee fitness and well-being, and providing the "Stay Fit' funding that was an incentive for me to learn a new sport during the COVID times.
• For OneNote in the cloud, which helps me manage my personal and professional life on a daily (let's face it, hourly) basis.
• For revealing to me one of my apparent superpowers, which is the ability to hold my head very steady during HoloLens demos.  (I got a surprisingly large number of comments about this, and one time a customer viewing a demo remotely on a group call asked if my screen had frozen or was I just that still.)
• Special thanks to the team behind the Standards of Business Conduct videos who made this annual training a fun and looked-forward-to event rather than the drudgery it could easily have been.

I'm so grateful for all I learned and for the friendships I've made.  I wish you all the best.

And now, onward to the next chapter!

How Businesses Are Using Mixed Reality To Overcome COVID-19 / Coronavirus Challenges

                                                                                         Image credit:  Microsoft

 

As people around the world are experiencing school closures, event cancellations, travel restrictions, and widespread uncertainty about resource availability in the coming weeks, many of the customer conversations I've been having around Mixed Reality are pivoting to address this situation.

 

Travel Replacement

Many customers are looking to the remote assistance / remote collaboration capabilities of Mixed Reality to get around the need for travel.  Instead of bringing the expert to the location, an individual with a MR-supporting device at the location can share what they see with the expert who remains at their home location.  Both individuals can mark up the virtual space, communicate via voice or text, share files, and capture images and video. 

The richest experience happens through a device like the HoloLens or Magic Leap 1, but some applications are available through Android and IoS devices and can be used immediately if the right prerequisites are in place (e.g. the required collaboration platform).

An example of a recent conversation I've had around this use case:  Travel restrictions are preventing skilled resources from entering a country to complete a construction job.  There are less-expert resources onsite who, if they could complete the work with expert guidance, might be able to keep the project schedule on track.  The company is rapidly implementing Remote Assist to address this challenge.

 

Just-In-Time Training

Preparation for, and prevention of, an epidemic requires new skills to be learned rapidly and at scale.  Cleaning, personal protection, and contamination handling procedures are hot topics right now, and holographic devices provide a safe, hands-on and retention-oriented way to go through each step in a process, and to repeat those steps until the learner feels comfortable doing them in the physical world.  Applications like Guides make it easy to quickly convert an SOP to the virtual space and add images, video, and 3D models to the experience.

One key challenge with this: sterilization of the device itself as it passes from one learner to another.

 

Remote Collaboration

Getting people in the same space to review the same thing is an expensive proposition for customers with global presence, and the virus is now making people aware that there's a health risk to in-person interactions in addition to the cost. 

However, when team members who are located all over the world need to review a complex design, it can take valuable time on calls using 2D screens just to agree on which section of the design they're talking about.  I hear this most frequently from customers with R&D, Creative, or Architecture / Construction business functions - reviewing and annotating the design in 3D is the desired way to innovate and reach agreement.

Avatars represent a virus-free way to meet and collaborate virtually. They can come together in real time from anywhere in the world, and, depending on how they were developed, can indicate where they are looking, request focus, and use gestures to convey ideas (in addition to voice and text communication in the virtual space). Partners like Spatial (virtual avatars) and PTC (3D modeling) are leading the way in providing solutions which address these challenges.  Companies who have already implemented such solutions as a cost savings to their design reviews are now reaping the benefit of minimizing their virus exposure as well.

 

Though these are unsettling times, it's inspiring to see how companies are applying technology, especially emerging technologies like Mixed Reality, to address this emergency and its serious disruptions.

What It Feels Like To Live In The Time Just Before Hyper-Reality

                                                                                Image credit:  Futurama S2 E13

I've been thinking about the time before the radio was invented and became popular - when the only electromagnetic waves passing through our world were naturally-occurring.

From the 1890s, when radio was invented, to the 1920s, when radio stations proliferated and radios began to be common in homes, man-made electromagnetic waves started to fill the air around us.

Today they're passing through us constantly, more and more all the time as we've added television, radar, satellites, cell phones, microwaves, etc.

Not to be all Chuck McGill, but I wonder sometimes what it felt like to live in that pre-manmade-waves time.  Not only whether it might have felt physically different, but also what connectedness felt like before it was possible to turn a switch and hear human voices from all over the world. (And the experience of being out in public before we were bombarded with music and marketing in every store, restaurant, gas station, and elevator.)

We're now approaching a similar time of change - where the space around us will soon be filled with spatially-anchored virtual advertisements, signposts, characters and data.

They won't physically pass through our bodies the way electromagnetic waves do, but they're going to exist outside our control and proliferate rapidly to the point where, depending on what you're able to pick up through your devices, the world is going to seem pretty cluttered.

It's already started - there are Pokemon roaming the world, I can place virtual items from major retailers in my home, and the more adventurous brands are creating unique overlays to reality (see Disney, Pepsi, even the dear old USPS).  Sometimes you can catch a hologram in concert.  At the time of this writing, you typically need a specific app to partake in these experiences (and you have to know they're there in the first place).  But it seems likely that standards will converge until we'll be able to discover unlimited experiences through a single device.

So I'd like to consider, and appreciate, what it feels like to live in this time before, or this time not-quite-there-yet.

• When you can hold up a camera, any camera, to the world and just focus on what's there.
• When your eyeglasses or sunglasses only give you better focus or glare protection.
• When windows and windshields are simply transparent glass screens between you and the exterior.
• When the information on paper pages doesn't stand up off the page.
• When our best option for interacting with someone remotely is through a video call on a 2D screen.

Basically, before the world looks like this (a really disturbing and worthwhile 6 minutes from our friends at Google):

I invite you to consider: What else should we be savoring about our current physical reality while we still can?

 

How Mixed Reality Can Place Knowledge Exactly Where You Need It

                                                                                        Image credit:  Microsoft

In my work we're seeing a lot of evidence that spatial mapping and placement is the next big breakthrough in how we experience information.  Culturally, we're starting to become used to accessing and receiving information exactly when we need it (with a connected phone always at our fingertips, and with AI on that device providing more suggestions the better it knows us), but with the spatial location component added, we'll soon be able to access information exactly where we need it.

For the consumer space, Bill Kilday of Niantic said it well:

"…there’s a second wave of innovation coming in mapping, and it has to do with the hot new tech trend of augmented reality. Pokemon GO is sort of a true north for that whole industry as the first use case. But you can imagine all these other geographic data sets, like a Yelp or a HotelTonight. Imagine holding your phone up and getting a Yelp review of the restaurant that you’re looking at through your phone, or a hotel availability with room rates over a hotel, or a bus schedule over a bus stop."

Consumers will see rapid innovation in this space as companies realize they're no longer tethered to screens and physical signs and billboards to serve us information - they can now surround us with the information they want us to receive, in the virtual world.  And as with most innovations for the consumer space, the enterprise space will benefit as well.

Recently I was doing a demo for a customer in the Manufacturing industry - showing them the Remote Assist application on the HoloLens.  (The app allows an authenticated user to place a call to another user on their network, and share the world through their eyes.  The typical scenario is a worker in a factory who needs to troubleshoot an issue - they place the HoloLens on their head (or use the app through a mobile phone), initiate the call, and can then visually collaborate with another user to solve the problem.  Either user can mark up the virtual space (e.g. with circles or arrows), capture images and video, and place documents and other files in the space.)

One of the attendees at my demo asked - "Could it know what part of the plant I'm in, and show me just the documents I need for the equipment that's there?"

The answer - it's not a feature of that particular application today, however it is absolutely possible.

The challenge of finding information on the manufacturing floor is real and well-documented. Dave Jones at KMWorld summed up the stark current state:

"The software used in manufacturing... is now starting to look seriously dated, which isn’t surprising given that many of the applications people continue to use were designed and built in an era before mobile phones and cloud technology even existed. Consequently, the tools still in use deliver confusing interfaces that make storing and searching for files a nightmare, where maintenance is more and more complicated every year and the likelihood of a critical system failure is now more of a certainty than risk."

My demo attendee's simple question lit up a whole series of new ideas for me.  If digital files can be associated to a precise physical location, and viewed in a virtual space, why should anyone have to spend time searching for the right manual, policy, or SOP for a particular piece of equipment or process?  What if all the documentation, specs, training, issue history, and support contact info could be virtually attached to every piece of equipment in a facility?

The components for achieving this are:

• For each location where you want to show the documents (images, videos, data, etc.), a spatial anchor or spatial locator (e.g. a QR code) that will act as the key to the documentation repository.
• Connectivity for that location - in other words, wifi access throughout the facility or at least at the points where the documentation is needed / displayed.
• An AR-enabled device on which to view the documents
• An application on the device that will serve the documentation (ideally with consideration given to a way for the user to interact if there are many documents or options).  At the time of this writing it would likely be a custom application.
• The document repository (and/or other information sources e.g. the database of the issue history)

Now that we've got the mechanism in place, how do we make sure the right documents appear in the right spaces?  What determines the most relevant document to show?  How do we security-trim the documents based on the user's level of training or privileges?

For details about the that side of the equation, let me turn this over to Mike Gilronan.  Mike discusses the knowledge management considerations for serving spatially-based files, and lays out some next steps toward making this kind of KM a reality.

The year 2020 is just a month away - it's definitely time for factories and manufacturing plants to make breakthroughs in their knowledge management.  The technology is here - are you ready to catapult your systems right over the "mobile" era to an entirely new form of interaction?

 

Further Reading:

KMworld:  Tech is Powering the Factory of the Future - But Also Hindering It

Forbes:  Augmented Reality And Geographic Information Show You What You Can't See In The World

Wharton:  Why Augmented Reality Is the Next Big Innovation in Mapping

 

The Discipline of Market Leaders, Revisited: One is No Longer Enough

Five years ago, when I was a full-time tech consultant, one of my go-to business texts was The Discipline of Market Leaders, by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema.  At this time, the tech startup I was working for was going through the "what kind of company are we going to be" phase, and this text was as relevant to a startup as it was to the longer-established companies I was consulting for.

If you're not familiar with the book, the core concept is that for any business to lead its market, it must excel in one of three areas:

    Operational Excellence - best delivery of product or services for best value.  Think classics like WalMart, FedEx, and McDonalds, and disruptors like Netflix, Uber, and Warby Parker.

    Product Leadership - best product through innovation.  Think athletic footwear like Nike, or tech like the Apple iPhone.

    Customer Intimacy - best customer knowledge and therefore best customer experience.  Think luxury brands, high-end hotels and fitness centers, and experience-oriented businesses like Disney World.

The book, published in 1995, detailed the key features and disciplines for each of the three areas, and I found it to be an effective lens for viewing a business.   It acknowledged that there was overlap - that many businesses performed well in at least one of the other areas - but the notion was that no one business could excel at all three, nor should it.

Today, that notion seems quaint, given the pace of technological change and consumer expectations.  The truth is that businesses must now excel at all three disciplines simultaneously in order to survive. 

Recent examples support this.  Consider how Tesla's Model 3 production delays were all over the news in Fall 2017 - Spring 2018.  This Innovation-oriented company received lots of negative press and sentiment because it didn't have solid operations.   Meanwhile the operationally-focused United Airlines stumbled badly and publicly in its treatment of customers.  Product leaders Pepsi, Dove, and Adidas all thought they were speaking to their customers with messages that would resonate, but got the tone wrong and received significant backlash.

These public failures, plus the daily news coverage of other companies' technological disasters (data breaches, outages and downtime, regulatory lapses, supply chain failures, quality issues) make it difficult for any company to believe they can continue doing business as they've always done.  For companies who know they need to transform in all areas, and whose competition is pulling ahead, how to take on such an overwhelming transition?

In my work with global enterprises over the past two years, I've seen most of their journeys take a typical technology progression.  The IT department is at the center of this massive change; sometimes the business is driving them, and sometimes they are pushing the business to evolve.

 

1. Operations. 

"Let's get out of the datacenter business."

Though by no means easy, it's often clear and straightforward to cut bottom-line costs and reduce maintenance overhead.  Companies start here by moving IT operations to the cloud in an IaaS model, so that they're essentially delivering the same functionality to their customers, but with greater ability to scale out, to withstand disasters, and to reduce costs and maintenance tasks.  More successful IT organizations also make the shift here toward standardization over customization, as they realize that all the heavy customizing they did in the past has left them with unsupported platforms and dwindling knowledge of all the intricacies.

On the business side, this effort is usually accompanied by restructuring and outsourcing. 

 

2. Innovation. 

"Now that we've got our base of operations in the cloud, let's take advantage of the services we didn't have access to before."

Many companies put a stake in the ground at this point, mandating that any new applications are to be created in a PaaS architecture, and starting the work of refactoring or rearchitecting their older applications.  The goal here is to free up developers from maintaining outdated, monolithic codebases, so that they can focus on innovation and faster feature delivery.   There's often an additional cost reduction in moving from IaaS to PaaS.

On the business side, companies at this stage may fund a new internal group focused on innovation, usually with keywords like "digital," "transformation," "accelerator," and/or "lab" in their names.  They may also start hosting an annual hackathon or idea-generating event.

 

3. Intimacy 

"What can we offer our customers that we couldn't offer before?"

As organizations start to get out from under all that technical debt, and "keeping the lights on" is no longer a full-time job for an entire team, they're able to focus better on what their customers have been asking for (and what their competition may already be delivering).   With their foundation in place, they can apply machine learning to their data and user interactions, and start to really understand their customers and build an intelligent journey for them.  This is the most strategic of the three efforts, and can have the biggest top-line payoff.

On the business side, they'll typically invest in strategy consulting to review and refresh their plan, and may be making painful, overdue decisions like killing off underperforming product lines or letting go of legendary long-time employees. 

 

The progression looks like this:

 

This is a multi-year journey, and a many-year journey.  Each step in the progression takes longer and costs more than the organization thinks it will.  In my experience, companies waste a lot of time in the following ways:

• Stuck in denial, doing nothing when they need to be changing
• Going it alone, usually without the necessary skills or experience in-house
• Under-investing, not budgeting for the true cost of change (typically because they're not taking inputs holistically from their vendors and partners - see "going it alone")
• Still working in silos, not communicating and standardizing across all the divisions, offices, departments, etc.

To remain competitive, companies can't rest on a single discipline.  They need to be good at all of them.  This takes a long time, and most aren't starting soon enough and moving with enough urgency.  They're also not using outside resources as much as they could.  The good news is that technology has advanced so far it is becoming a great leveler - even the smallest company can launch a new application in months (even weeks), scale out to millions of users around the globe, and create an intelligent, rich experience for the end-user.

This is also the bad news.

 

Resources

The Discipline of Market Leaders via Open Library

PR disasters of 2017

HBR:  Why so many high-profile digital transformation projects fail

Missing Trip Summary (or, Questions I Didn't Ask My Dad Before He Died)

My father on Cape Cod, 1954? Photographer unknown.

My father died this past Saturday, November 18.  He was a month away from turning 90.  While his death was sudden and unexpected, it was not entirely shocking, given his age and declining health.  

People seem to generally understand:  you're never ready for something like this, no matter how much you accept that it is inevitable.

The part of this I didn't expect or foresee, is that a sudden death removes the possibility of any kind of final report-out.  The sort of summary that you might give when you know it's over but you can still communicate.  When you may feel more free to tell the truth and not be looking out for someone else's feelings.  When there's nothing more to do but look back and make an assessment. 

My dad didn't have a terminal diagnosis or any kind of timeline for "the end."  He was a tough old guy and I suppose we all thought he would keep going until a doctor told him he wouldn't.  I made sure, years ago, to try to think up all the questions I had about his life and to get them answered.  What was your first job?  What was high school like for you?  What was it like to get drafted?  What was your earliest memory?  I've got his answers written down.  He had a great sense of humor and there is a lot of good stuff.

But now that it's over, I am thinking of so many questions that I didn't ask.  Questions that didn't occur to me to ask before, or that I guess I thought were pointless to ask along the way because it wasn't yet the end.  Things like:

• So how was life really?
• What would you do differently if you could do it over again?
• What was your all-time favorite book, movie, song, food, etc.?
• What was the best advice you ever received? (And the worst?)
• When were you happiest?
• Did you do everything you wanted to do?
• Who was your best friend?
• What do you wish you had spent more time doing? (and less time doing?)
• How do you see yourself living on in me?  What parts of me carry you on?

For all those 90 years, what was the upshot?  Did he do this kind of stock-taking on his own?  I feel fairly certain that if I'd asked him, "So how was your life, really?" a few weeks or months ago, he probably would have given me some flip, deflecting answer.  He was having a lot of trouble communicating due to a stroke last year, so that would have affected how much he conveyed.  I should have asked anyway.  Maybe there is no way to get the final report, maybe this "what did it all mean" questioning will always be part of the experience of someone's death.  All I know is that the overall trip summary is missing and I really wish I had it.

 

And, because it wouldn't be a proper blog post without a resources section:

A good article on How to Find Meaning in the Face of Death (and the importance of a legacy project)

I recently read about an app that helps people share their end-of-life preferences 

If you want to learn more about someone but don't know what to ask, the Proust Questionnaire is a good place to start.

There are lots of other good lists of questions out there.  Searching the term "questions to ask a parent" can help you compile your own list.

 

Need to generate large, production-looking dummy datasets? Look no further!

False front facade in Bremen, Germany, by Mario Lurig on Flickr.

One of my colleagues on the Data Architect team, Patrick El-Azem, just released a new tool for the community which will be extremely useful for developers, architects, data scientists, and anyone else working with large datasets. 

As Patrick outlines in his blog about the tool, there are many reasons you might need to work with a large custom dataset that is free from proprietary and/or confidential information.  In my time in the partner ecosystem, I saw many great demo ideas stall at inception because it was too difficult and time-consuming to create the realistic-looking "dummy" data needed to populate the demo. 

When you're in a situation that requires production-like data which is representative of reality but safe to use, where scrubbing an existing dataset isn't secure enough and the available public datasets don't fit the bill, Patrick's Synthetic Data File Generator (SDFG) will get you up and running quickly with a synthetic dataset built to your specifications.

If you've tried other tools for this purpose, such as mockaroo, you'll find that the SDFG provides more granular control and complexity, for example inter-related multiple file sets and dynamic fields.

To get started using the tool, read Patrick's blog, which includes a full walk-through, specs, prereqs, and even a feature roadmap; or head straight to GitHub for the download.

What could you do with 250,000,000 records today?  The possibilities are endless!

 

 

 

 

 

I was visited by the Ghost of Television's Past

New Television Antenna by Norman Rockwell, shared by Georges Nijs on flickr

Saturday, February 25, 12:30 pm - there's a knock on my front door.  It's a young woman who tells me she is from Nielsen, looking for antenna-only households.  She's holding print materials and looks legit.  With regret I tell her, not only do we have no antenna, we don't have any live TV at all.  She says, "That's my challenge. We pay people to watch TV... I just need one household in the area."

As she walked away I had that feeling you get when you see in the news a 110-year-old person celebrating their birthday, and they are quoted as saying the secret to long life is "eating a lot of dark chocolate" or "hard work and fresh air."   Nielsen, how are you surviving this long on hard work and fresh air? 

Here are the thoughts and imaginary conversations that obsessed me for hours after that two-minute interaction:

First - door-to-door recruiting?  Really?  Given the difficulty of your task finding "antenna-only households," how about developing a fleet of drones that can recognize rooftop antennas, to pinpoint the addresses your foot soldiers should target?  It's technically feasible (in case you're not already working on this, here's a case study you may be interested in.  The company in the case study uses drones to recognize antenna problems - your task is that much simpler, just "show me antennas"), although the reality is, modern antennas are indoor and hidden.  Perhaps you could find cord-cutters via forums, dedicated interest websites, and social media? 

Second - how relevant, really, is the opinion of an antenna-only household?  Your website states "we collect more than two million paper diaries from audiences across the country each year during 'sweeps'." Two million PAPER diaries?!?!? In 2017 is there no better way?  Or is it that the households willing to participate are the kinds of households who don't have computers, smartphones, or the Internet (or can't be depended upon to use them if they do have them)?  How about shipping your panelists a low-cost device for input? 

Third - I can't get past the door-to-door thing.  The only foot salespeople I've dealt with in the past few years have been Boy Scouts selling Christmas wreaths, or similar local children selling raffle tickets to support their sports teams.  Their moms drive them from driveway to driveway.  Nielsen, for a six billion dollar company, I expect more sophistication. I really want you to find a way to start the pitch with convincing language like, "Our data indicates that you may have cut the cord with cable and would be interested in..."  (What about offering an antenna as part of the deal?)

Finally - regret.  My vague feeling of "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member" is at war with my desire to be part of this mysterious system.  I have always wondered about Nielsen families.  Possibly because my mother was a decades-long participant in National Family Opinion, and I grew up with their evolving methods in my home, I feel a certain comfort and nostalgia about investing my time to answer corporate surveys.  If it's interesting to be part of new product launches, imagine the feeling of being part of television history.  Over the weekend I even considered buying an antenna and contacting the company for a second chance - but it seems that, per their website, there's no way to request to be a panelist. 

As with so many things, luck favors the prepared.

 

 

I'd like to thank the Academy - the Microsoft Academy, that is

With respect to everyone around the world who is suffering right now, and at the risk of tone-deaf blogging, I have to share that I feel like a million bucks today, because last night I passed the final project in the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science.  It's been a nine-month journey through nine courses plus that capstone project, and it's made a huge impact on how I approach data projects, from small "hobby" data analysis to multi-year enterprise data initiatives.  It's also made a huge difference in my confidence level generally. 

When Microsoft launched the program internally back in April 2016, with the ambitious goal of addressing the US technology gap in computer sciences while bringing more diversity into the available pool of candidates, I was fortunate to get into the pilot program.  This meant that the low cost of each course (about $50 per course at the time I went through them) was covered by Microsoft, and I had my manager's and team's support for the time commitment.  Several of my team-mates joined the pilot at the same time, and we were also able to nominate the technical and data-focused folks at our partners to go through it with us.

The public launch happened July 2016.  You can find the full description of the program here and the course schedule here.  The track diverges at several points, allowing you to choose, for example, whether to learn R or Python (although you could certainly take all the courses).  I highly recommend it for anyone who loves data and wants to learn more about how to wrangle it.  Here's why:

What I loved about the program:

• excellent, engaging teachers and well-thought-out content.
• active discussion forums and community support, quick responses from the program coordinators.
• getting hands-on in a way I certainly wouldn't have if I'd only explored these concepts on my own through tutorials and demo videos.
• the flexibility to learn at my own pace, and to choose where to dig in and where to skim.
• being part of a diverse cohort of data lovers from around the world

What I learned:

• an appreciation for the complexity of data science. These courses provide a great foundation, but they also make it clear that non-technical factors like experience, dedication to the truth, resistance to easy answers and correlations, creativity in problem-solving, and patience and perseverance are what separate a good data scientist from a great one.
• how to use the tools.  Microsoft makes software like Power BI and Azure Machine Learning Studio that is so easy to use, you might feel like you can pick them up in a few minutes.  The hands-on labs in this course showed the real power in these programs, and how the pieces of the stack fit together. 
• about myself:  I learned that it's possible to take on a degree program with an already-full life, and that it's actually fun to learn intimidating new skills. For example, the final project, which I vaguely dreaded through the nine preceding courses, turned out to be an addictive daily pursuit that felt more like a puzzle than a science project.

What you should know if you're considering this program:

• If you already have a database or developer background, that will help with some of the courses, but you probably won't sail through them all!
• if you do NOT have lots of database or programming experience, you can still do this!  But the courses will probably take you more like 20 hours each than 8 hours. 
• you can audit the courses for free, but if you want the certificate, you need to purchase the "verified certificate" for each course (and pass them)
• If Data Science isn't your thing, more MPPs are coming - expect future tracks to open in 2017 including topics like Big Data Engineering and Front End Web Development.

Who helped me:

I hit snags and lost my nerve many times along the way.  I wouldn't have made it through without a village.  So let me take this opportunity to very publicly thank the folks who talked me down, pumped me up, let me phone-a-friend, and otherwise were There For Me:

Allan Da Costa Pinto

Sri Ganapathy

Chris Kahrs

John Pelak

Diana Phillips

Bill Sherry

Julie Turner

 

& all the folks on the Yammer and edX discussion threads who asked the questions I wanted to ask, raised issues and got them resolved before I encountered them, and provided suggestions and encouragement.

 

Finally, thank you Graeme Malcolm & the entire team (I'm guessing more of an army than a village in this case) who made this program possible. 

 

I am employed by Microsoft, and the opinions expressed herein are my own.