Ask HN: Learning BI on MS Stack. What to Build for Practice?
I have been a MS infrastructure guy for 20 years as my primary job (contractor for last several) but I have also been a .NET/SQL dev since v1.0. Before that, Classiclassic ASP, VB etc :)
I have had enough of infrastructure (cloud and on-prem) and don't want a .NET dev job as that would suck hard and I don't know the FoM js frameworks these days and, frankly, can't be bothered with them... I like plain JS (call me crazy but it works for me)... I prefer WPF mind you!
I want to break into the BI world and since I know MS tech I figured that is where I will start.
Through Bizspark I have free Azure for at least the next year.
I also have extensive business experience (ran a few, am a mentor/give advice to a few more currently) so translating BI to actionable business should be within my skillset or at least, within relatively straighforward reach!
I don't want to be a Data Engineer, building the infrastructure, so that's out. However, I don't know whether I want to be a BI Dev doing MDX and models and whatnot or spend more time in the BI reporting side (Tableau, Power BI etc), however, I figure at this stage I will learn it from end to end to at least give me a good foundation and who knows, I may naturally enjoy one over the other.
In terms of learning? I am gonna turn it up to 11 for the next year and spend as much time learning as possible, but more importantly, "doing"! The first couple of months will be on the theory and "book" learning (well, videos since I have a Pluralsight sub and also EdX) but after that I want to just spend time "doing" and, possibly, publishing the results.
So, given my rookie status, what would be some good BI projects to get my teeth into? Oh, and some good datasets (I have AdventureWorks so I'll be starting with that for now).