Stanford Database Class and an Experiment

Stanford is running a free online databases course this fall. I've signed up to get more info and once that info comes out, I'll be registering for the course. It runs from October 10 till December 12. I assume there will be two or three video lectures per week along with projects or homework.

If allowed by the course guidelines, I'm going to blog my notes from lectures and post my projects / homework up on GitHub.

I want to become a better writer, learn about databases, and possibly make a little money from Google ads. Taking the database course and blogging my notes and thoughts will help me to accomplish all three.

My background is mostly in electrical engineering but I do write software. Although I've been formally programming since my first year of college (2001), I've never taken a formal algorithms, data structures, or database course. These days I write some C# for Windows and C for microcontrollers but I've also worked with Java and C++ and done a tiny bit of Python and Perl. My background probably matches a lot of people out there who are self taught coders and I think that provides me with a good audience desiring to learn about databases and that I can easily connect with.

I had wanted to try out Tumblr but after opening an account and playing with their interface, I think I'll stick with Blogger. Tumblr wasn't necessarily bad, but I'm used to Blogger (even with the new interface) and writing in the HTML view is pretty unencumbered for me. I'll post up a link to the database class notes blog shortly.