This is the ninth post in a weekly series of blog posts I will be writing to document my experience in CS327E, Elements of Databases, for the Elements of Computing Program at The University of Texas at Austin.
Check out my previous week’s blog post.
Monday, March 18
Spring break was well needed, however I did work most of the break, getting ready for The Cohen New Works Festival, which is now just one short week away! There is so much to do! In class today we reviewed some of the quarks of python, how it treats certain datatypes differently depending on context like sets, tuples and lists. Having worked with SQL and Python before, I understand why Professor Downing is spending extra time explaining some of python’s odd behavior. I remember getting such not being able to figure out why one of my variables would not hold a value. Hello immutable datatypes!
Wednesday, March 20
Today we introduced regular expressions. These are some of the most helpful yet confusing bits of programing to me. I’ve used them in text editors to find and replace certain patterns, however today we introduced much more than I have ever used. Of course we simply scratched the surface but even with the bit we learned today, I feel like I have a much better understanding of regular expressions and how to use them. The chosen schema from Project 2 was announced this week. While it wasn’t my schema, I can’t argue, because the chosen schema was much better than mine. While mine was more strict, specific and complex, in hindsight that wasn’t the goal, the goal was to create a simple schema that provided just enough structure to organize data, but not complicate meeting the schema. Mine was simply too specific and too structured, which made validating data difficult. I’m happy with the chosen schema and look forward to adopting it in project 4!
Friday, March 22
The Festival is next week and I have so much work to do. My mind was else where during class today, but we introduced working with SQL from Python with the MySQL-Python library. I’ll be out of class next week due to the festival, but luckily I have worked with python and MySQL before, so hopefully I’ll be able to get caught back up pretty quickly.