Like a lot of people in America right now, I haven't been going to my job. SeaWorld, Universal, Disney, and all major theme parks have closed down here in central Floriduh. I'm good, my family is good, and everyone that I know is doing ok. Financially is gonna suck for some of my part-time coworkers, but as a full-time employee I'm getting payed 32 hours for the time being. I've been washing my hands a lot and I have been a long time practitioner of social distancing so this is nothing. We found toilet paper.
I know it sucks for some people, specially for the folks in other parts of the world like France and Italy, but for me, this is pretty sweet. Me and my girlfriend are moving to Downtown Orlando soon, so we're taking advantage of this free time. All this to say, it's been pretty normal.
So the Bootcamp... It's gonna take a while to get used to doing remote classes. One of the reasons why I opted for an in person Bootcamp instead of online was because I knew that I needed that direct and immediate feedback that's impossible to get in a remote setting. We are using Zoom with the Instructor hosting the meeting and using breakout rooms when working with exercises. And it doesn't help that we have reached that point in the Bootcamp were there is very little lecturing, so doing exercises in groups remotely it's kinda of tricky. But like anything new, it's just a matter of getting used to it.
Week 12 was all about SQL. The whole setup for using SQL for me is kinda messy. The suite of software you have to download like SQL Workbench, SQL Server, and others... ugh! It's like using Dreamweaver to create Excel spreadsheets.
The first day, when we started working with the basic queries to create initial databases, tables and then INSERT INTO's, was a bit rough. Probably due more to it being online. One thing I been starting to worry about lately is how slow I am to get focused when doing the exercises. I never thought of myself as being a slow coder. I thought that to build something that does something substantial, something more than just responding to click events, something that get's past that 100 line mark in your text editor, I thought that it's normal for it to take some time. But I feel super dumb when given these 5-paragraph-long README instructions to build an NODE CLI application in 30 minutes.
On the second day, Day 35 if you're keeping track, they introduced the mysql package for Node. For this day we started doing exercises that hooked up to the Database to be able to query to it, add, etc.
Finally on day 36 we learned how to import .csv files, do more complex queries like JOIN, and made and inquirer node cli app that will search through a bigger database of a list of 5000 top hit songs.
In the end I think I got the basics. The SQL query syntax is easy to understand, at least when you're doing a basic search. I can get complicated with the joining of tables. But the basics like SELECT FROM WHERE is pretty self explanatory.
The due project / assignment for this week was a Note Taker web app. This is our first, and my first, proper app with a backend that was deployed to Heroku. Super proud of this one. I might customize the CSS for this one. Check out the Repo if you wanna peek at how the server part is working with Express and all that.
Let's keep going.