Hackbright Day 11: The TL;DR version => I am brain dead and we talked about SQL

Today we talked about SQL. I've had some experience with SQL and it was mostly me being super confused about it because I had no idea what was going on, but I could poke around with my queries to get the data I wanted. And then I stopped thinking about SQL because I used the output for my plots and tables, without needing to look at the query syntax again. While a similar usage was brought up in class today, it was advised that we use SQL in much better ways than I have in the past. I completely agree that people should actually use SQL instead of faking it the way I did. Oops.

So we learned how to create a table within a database, insert into the database, and then manipulate how the data from the table was displayed. This was accomplished by using the commands select, where, group by, and distinct. We also learned how to join tables. And if I ever get super untired I will come back to this and write all of it down. In the meantime, if you're interested in SQL, you should try SQL Zoo. SQL Zoo contains interactive tutorials on how to use all of those aforementioned SQL commands and then some. I started going through the tutorials awhile ago, but was reacquainted with them today. 

I gave a short tech talk on cat, head, tail, and grep. It was probably not at all clear about what I was trying to get across. I think everyone got confused when I piped everything to some other command and then played with the output. The good thing is that I'm not going to be threatened with getting kicked out of Hackbright for a bad presentation because, as I keep having to tell myself, Hackbright is not grad school.

I had my weekly one-on-one with my advisor, who is super amazingly awesome. He helped to allay my fears that the market is saturated for junior developers and that having zero real jobs would mean that everyone ends up dead in a ditch. AND HE LOVES EMACS TOO. I really enjoy the high level of concern that Hackbright has for our well being. In fact, when I tweeted that I was having hand pain, one of the instructors ended up seeing it and showed me how to stretch out my hand so that I didn't hurt it more and to stop using my thumb on the trackpad, which is apparently a really direct way to injure yourself.

And I am super tired. We had cake today because it was one of the instructors' birthdays (coincidentally my advisor). We had cupcakes on Friday because it was one of the other instructors' birthdays then (the one with the stretches, actually). I very much enjoy the fact that Hackbright is a pro-cake institution.