Week 11 - Classes Continue

Hi,

Wow! Am I really going into the 12th week of classes? My, how the time flies. And, it is jam-packed with stuff to do.

Last week seemed really busy, and after meeting with my group today, this coming week seems like it is going to be even more full with meetings, and deadlines and preparing for some exams. I am sure that I am going to need to take some time off of work to get it all done. Well, that is how it goes. So, enough with the rambling, let's talk about last week.

As I mentioned in my last post, my group and I had turned in our project and were waiting for a grade and some feedback to get started on the second part. Earlier in the week, Alex, the grader for this project, gave us that feedback to help us improve our app. Much of what was given had to do with the implementation of our django models and our API, and the apparent couple of areas where the two were disjointed. Overall we did quite well, and have been working to get our models down correctly in accordance with the feedback we received to continue with this project, part 2. In general, I think with the models, we have been having some difficulty trying to relate the way that they are formed compared to what we have read in class regarding database design, but after our meeting today, I feel like we were able to sketch out some ideas and get a better grasp on what these models mean and how we will be able to tie them into the site. This project has proven thus far to be a really great learning experience.

The class part of the week was spent looking at different SQL files to get an understanding of selects, projects, subqueries, and joins. From what we've reviewed, I can say that there a lot of different ways to do a single queries, and SQL handles complex searching under the covers, which is really nice. Again, from dealing with the django models and learning a lot more of database nuance, there is definitely much more to SQL to learn.

That's all I've got for this week

Until the next one,

Sophie

Week 10 - IDB1 is Done

Hello again,

So, last time I wrote a bit about the project that was due on Thursday of this past week, and as you may have noticed, I was feeling pretty good about it. Now the project has been turned in, and I am feeling really good about the product we submitted. Our group met up quite a bit throughout this week to add to, move around, and decide on the generalities of the project while making sure to understand and meet the requirements that were laid out by Dr. Downing. I also feel like we got a relatively large chunk of work done for the amount of time that was spent working. I shared the project with some friends to show some of what my school work is like and I think they were fairly impressed.

My group chatted for a few after class on Friday so we have a reasonably good idea of where we need to start to tackle part 2 of this project. We changed some ideas on our Django model structure during the course of the project and I think we are still needing to really solidify this before moving on. In addition, while I think we are all feeling like our site is looking damn snazzy, we talked about getting some basic design decisions going for the look and feel and will want to get that going as well before/while we are setting up our templates to pull in data from our database. From the discussions in class this week and the end of the last week, I have an idea that Dr. Downing will want us to really focus on getting our databases working well with our apps and possibly get some thought down for refactoring.

This week was the first week we were assigned to read from the Refactoring book, and there was a quiz on it on Friday. I did not give myself time to read from it before class, so my quiz grade was a whopping 1 point for putting my name down, nice. This week was also the week following Spring Break, and I have to say that I am glad that the second iteration of this project has not yet been formally posted. I feel like I have not had a break since the week before Spring Break and am happy to have this time to relax, even if it is only for a couple of hours. I had a project meetup today for my computer graphics class, so I did not get the entire day off, but it still feels quite nice.

Speaking of relaxation, I think I may have a few more moments of it before getting back to the grind.

I'll be back!

~Sophie