7 Day AIS Challenge Day 2 · AI Automation Society

7 Day AIS Challenge Day 2

The task today was huge for me. It closed a loop that was the basis for me starting to learn programming and computer skills. I am going to share a LinkedIn post I made a while back that explains it best. This was before AI was what it is today.

I started my career in the trades, and at that time there was not a strong focus on computer skills.

I come from a generation where computers were only just starting to appear in schools. We learned the basics, but technology did not have the importance it does today.

When I returned to school in 2008, my computer skills were barely functional, but enough to get me through my Materials Engineering Technology studies. When I joined my current employer, I will be honest: my office-related computer skills were pretty weak.

Like many people, I had “Microsoft Office skills” on my resume, but in reality I was just getting by. At that point, continuous learning was not a major focus for me.

A few years later, our department hired a new employee named Praveen.

Praveen had incredible computer skills, and working with him opened my eyes to what was possible.

One moment in particular has always stuck with me.

At the time, I was working full time while also carrying a full-time course load for my BTech. One lunch hour, I was manually transferring warranty claim data from multiple vehicle manufacturers into an Excel sheet for a systems reliability project. By my estimate, it was going to take me somewhere between 16 and 20 hours just to build the data set.

Praveen came over and asked what I was doing.

I explained the project and how long I thought it would take.

He told me he thought he could do it by the end of lunch.

I honestly thought he was dreaming.

He explained web scraping and how he would approach it. I will spare everyone the technical details, but by 12:50 he had sent me a fully formatted Excel file with the entire data set I needed for my project.

He had saved me days of work.

I told him I would give him $100 if he could actually pull it off. He tried to refuse it, but I made him take it.

That was the moment I realized how important improving my computer skills was going to be.

Since then, I have spent years improving my knowledge through platforms like Coursera, EdX, Udemy, Codecademy, and others. I taught myself advanced Microsoft Office skills, web development, Power Platform, SQL, reporting tools, and more.

Most recently, I have been learning Python and AI-related skills, and the productivity gains have been incredible.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that sometimes the people who change your career are not the people above you.

Sometimes they are the people around you who show you a different way of thinking.

I will always be grateful to Praveen for showing me what was possible.

For Day 2 I scraped the highlighted and top rated courses from Coursera. I didn't have anything immediately at the top of my priority list to scrape so this was more academic. What took Praveen just under an hour I did in about 20 minutes here.

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7 Day AIS Challenge Day 2