Tag: MySQL

Day 64: When one door closes…

…we hope my ID badge still works in the revolving door back at the office.

It’s the last day of class. I’m feeling an immense sense of gratitude. I’m sad our three months of training are over, as I’m going to miss everyone. We are all going to meet weekly for additional follow-up training for a few months, but that’s going to be over Skype, so it’s not going to quite be the same. It’s also been nice to put a lot of everyday “busy-ness” on the back burner while I focused on classwork—I got to see what was really important. There are a few things in my life that I think I’m going to let go by the wayside, as they didn’t turn out to be as important as I once thought…not the knitting group, though! Never!

I want to thank everyone for making this possible (at this point, they’re all reading my blog). I wasn’t sure, in the beginning, if I could pull this off at an age where many of my friends are retiring. The last time I coded anything was over 10 years ago, and that was mainframe reporting. Now I’m able to create functional sites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Node.js, Angular/TypeScript, MySQL, Handlebars, etc. Going forward, I’m going to learn Java. I couldn’t have done it without the Code Academy, our great instructors, and the managers that pulled it all together.

I’ve been asked if I’m going to keep up the blog. The answer to that is a resounding YES! Think about it…transitioning back to the department I left as a business analyst, and am now returning to as a developer–it’s material that’s just going to write itself.

I do hope my new laptop shows up soon…

Day 61: Showtime!

Today was the day our final projects were due. I managed to do my final GitHub push at a bit past 11:00 a.m. I had to add some SELECT/UPDATE/DELETE options on our SQL code we provided for alternatively loading data via MySQL (vs. PostgreSQL). Also, I had to beef up my README file a bit. Oddly enough, my README files are all the rage with my instructor and with my classmates…

We all did well with our presentations—everyone did a great job with their sites! Yours truly had some technical difficulties, due to not having used Skype in meetings for over three months now. For the life of me, I couldn’t get the damn “Presenting” bar to go away, so that I could switch browser tabs. It was the height of embarrassing, especially when one of my fellow students (who’s probably half my age) had to help me get rid of it. Other than that, demonstrating my site went well. If you’re reading, Mary S., I invoked you as a prospective knitter on my site, to walk through the functionality. I had you register for the site, log in, flake out, needing to change your email on the site, and then you decided to delete your account. I showed off my @ViewChild functionality code used to “Go to Top” without reloading an entire page—I’m probably too ludicrously proud of this, but it’s because I figured it out by researching for myself. I think that is our biggest takeaway from our entire training—learning how to tap every resource we can to figure out an issue.

I feel relieved the presentation is over, but disappointed. This is it for fun coding for the week. From here on in is the transition back to reality…

Day 52: MySQL…the Sequel…ize

Today we continued our MySQL adventure with something called “Sequelize” which honestly sounds like a Star Trek term—as in, “Mr. Sulu, sequelize the photon torpedoes!” It also sounds like something done with movie franchises that are well past their prime (“Rocky XIX,” anyone?). The entertaining thing is that autocorrect is coming up with all sorts of naughty words for Sequelize—especially if you initially spell it wrong.

Sequelize is an ORM (object-relational mapping) which we used for MySQL. This is also used for something called PostgreSQL, and yes, I think our instructor is just making stuff up now. All kidding aside, PostgreSQL seems to be very similar to Oracle tables, so I’m sure this will be beneficial to understand when I eventually return to our department.

The thing that’s giving me a coronary is that we need to learn all this stuff, at the rate of one major concept per day, and then APPLY IT TO THE CAPSTONE. I just barely have my routes operational from our last lab, and even so, my pages are not what one might call “functional,” except for the ones that applied to the requirements of the lab. To top it off, we now have to divide everything into routes, controllers, services, models…and I know I’m forgetting something. This is supposed to make the code easier to maintain, but honestly, if you can’t FIND anything, how much simpler is it??? I already get confused about which code is server code vs. client code. This is going to send me running screaming into the night…oh, right. We live in the boonies and THIS is what’s out there:

I’ll have to take my chances with the scary code…

Day 51: Oh, CRUD…

Today we learned all about MySQL. This was FINALLY something I knew something about. As a BA and previously as a developer, I’ve worked extensively with SQL. The most complicated part of this was installing MySQL Workbench. We mainly created files and performed CRUD—create, read, update, and delete. This was a bit tricky as applied to our new server friends POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE.

“PGPD” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “CRUD,” does it?

There was more work with Postman, as we determined if our routes worked. I had some nasty, nasty, ugly, angry red messages spewing furiously from the command prompt window every time I attempted the “U” in CRUD. It turned out to be something stupid. I’d put “post” instead of “put” when referring back to the db_queries.js. After that was fixed, everything worked fine.

In other news, we had to fill out a survey about our training. Our answers are going to be made into “cards” for our new department, so that they can get to know us better. This is absolutely HILARIOUS in my case, as my “new” department is going to be my old department, and they already know all about me. I felt sort of idiotic when under “fun facts about me” I said that “I knit and crochet!” My department is going to take one look at this and say, “Well, DUH!!!” Then they’re going to laugh until they snort in a decided undignified manner.

We also had to come up with a quote. This is one of my favorites, by W.H. Auden:

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.”

Precisely why I decided to attend Code Academy.