#imnotfromlondon

[leftlion-extended]

Project: INFL Kickstarter video Client: I’m Not From London Ever since we did our LeftLion Magazine Kickstarter campaign last year we’ve had lots of people asking us for help on theirs. I’m Not From London are a special case though, very old friends of ours and a company we admire greatly. So when they asked for a bit of help with their Kickstarter video we were happy to lend them the services of Raphael from our team to work on this. Watch out for the exploding guitar amp!

[scottyschup]

week, day = 3, 1

"Some people say 'S-Q-L', but I think 'sequel' sounds better and we tend to say 'sequel' here at App Academy." ~ David Runger

And now I start trying to unlearn 5 years of saying S-Q-L :(

But aside from how to pronounce the thing, today's intro to SQL was as riveting and thrilling as a lover of all things chart/spreadsheet/data could hope for. David walked us through the basics of relational databases, explained the naming conventions used and the Rails-motivated reasons for those naming conventions, and talked about the different types of JOINs and their various uses. Having worked with MySQL and PHP to design a data-driven website for my Alaska summer business, I wasn't really surprised by anything covered today, but it was really nice to have such a thorough and well-organized refresher.

The exercises for the day were pretty straightforward until the very last set which involved a lot of self joins on top of self joins. The concepts themselves were not necessarily difficult, but the data set was...well, I'm still not exactly sure what it was. Bus routes in London, maybe? There were a lot of numbers with minimal explanation, a lot three-letter abbreviations, and a lot of unfamiliar noun piles like "London Road" and "Sighthill" and "Craiglockhart" (sic!). Regardless of our confusion, my partner and I got through all but the very last query, and mostly had a firm grasp on what was happening.

Also, today we took Assessment 2. I'm happy to say I did quite well. I think writing the game War from scratch the day before helped me work through some of the trickier logic ahead of time so I could focus on the interactions between the classes and getting the specs to pass.