CS373 Fall 2019 Week 10: Nidhin Varghese

What did you do this past week?
For the most part, I was focused on studying for my algorithms exam. The exam is on Monday, and I’ll be able to concentrate on the next phase of the website after it’s over. In class, we started learning about SQL in depth. I haven’t really worked with SQL before this class, and I still miss working with MongoDB, but I think SQL is a very important skill to have.
What’s in your way?
We need to first talk about what exactly we should modify and determine the best way to add functionality to our website without messing up existing code. Now that we already have a dynamic website, we need to be certain that we’re not pushing changes that break existing features.
I also think that it would be good for me to read up on SQL operations before we start modifying back-end code so that requests can be handled as efficiently as possible.
What will you do next week?
We will improve the front-end design, and we’ll add back-end functionality so that we can sort, filter, and search through our model and instance pages. Luckily, we shouldn’t have to make any changes to the database for this phase. I think I’ll only be doing back-end work for this phase.
What was your experience with SQL?
I’m not very familiar with SQL, and I need to take a little bit of time to review everything we’ve learned in class so far. We’ve learned a lot of information related to SQL in such a short amount of time. I like that SQL uses simple syntax, but some of the concepts, such as joins and sub-queries, aren’t immediately intuitive.
I like that we’re spending a lot more time on in-class HackerRank assignments, but I there were more practice problems that I could do to really understand the material.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I found this useful SQL cheat sheet that might be useful for studying: http://www.cheat-sheets.org/sites/sql.su/ It goes into detail on some things we haven’t covered yet, but it’s really helpful for general syntax.