Projects

Project	Team	Effort	Focus	Skills you'll build	Prereq
Project 1 BigQuery's First Heist →	Solo	~16–20 hrs	Write decision-worthy SQL on a 500 MB+ public dataset	Correlated subqueries, CTEs, window functions, paper debug tables	None
P2 · Science BigQuery Part Deux →	Solo or pairs	~35–45 hrs	Enrich with new data, visualize, train a BigQuery ML model	CSV upload & joins, matplotlib, BigQuery ML, query plan analysis	Complete P1
P2 · Systems NanoMem →	Solo or pairs	~35–45 hrs	Build a search engine that gives AI coding agents persistent memory	Inverted index + BM25, LSH for vectors, hybrid retrieval, query planner, parity vs SQLite FTS5 and sqlite-vec	Complete P1

Everyone does Project 1. For Project 2, you pick one path: Data Science or Systems, not both. Both options take roughly the same time (~35–45 hrs) and earn the same credit. Pick by interest, not by difficulty.