Week 10

One week less to go! In terms of projects, this week was the ready-set-go week for the 2nd phase of project 3. The main goal of this phase is to change everything from working statically (if any) to a more dynamic approach. So, in our particular case, no more hard coded names of games, consoles, and studios in our splash page. However, thankfully during phase one we decided to take the less appealing approach at the time, which was making everything dynamic from the get go (except for the references in the splash page). So since last week our project has been using templates for all the categories and feeding them with data retrieved with the help of Django and our API. So in terms of that we really have less work than groups who implemented everything statically during phase 1, however, there are still other aspects to phase 2. For example, during this phase we will be implementing the data base that will be feeding the data from now on. That is what we have been doing during the weekend. This actually has a lot to do with what we have been discussing in the class room (SQL and getting information from data bases). I think that in the end, when the project is complete (after phase 3) I will feel very proud of it and will probably be able to talk about it during interviews and any type of professional environment. It has been by far one of the most "real-world/professiona-ly" projects I have worked in since I have been a student in UT CS.

In class, prof. Downing has spent some time teaching us how to code in SQL and different techniques to manipulate data stored in large databases. This obviously comes in very handy for our project. I am also currently taking a class called Data Management, which emphasizes quite a bit on SQL so between that class and prof. Downing's Software Engineering I have began to feel very familiar with SQL's syntax and way of manipulating data. We will see how all this fits into phase 3 eventually.