Hackbright Day 19: Magical SQL Python Gnomes (but not GNOME as in RIP GNOME 2)

Today we talked about SQLAlchemy, which is a SQL handler for Python. It's called SQLAlchemy because it's basically magical if you don't know how SQL works and it's still pretty spectacular if you do. It basically takes ugly SQL calls and turns them into things that look way more like python syntax. SQLAlchemy is called an object-relational mapping (or ORM as people call it) program. In SQL, we have databases that contain tables. These tables have columns that contain different kinds of information for a given record (or row). What SQLAlchemy does, is translate the python we input so that SQL can handle it. It does this by essentially mapping a table to a class, a column to an attribute of a class, and a record (or row) to an instance of the class. It's really nice, the syntax is mostly familiar (although the OR and AND statements are a bit weird), but it seems pretty useful. The other cool thing about SQLAlchemy is that you can use whatever SQL "engine" that you want. We're using SQLite with it, but I'll probably look into things like PostgreSQL for my project.

Speaking of projects, we talked about project selection today. As of a week ago, I had a project that I was dead set on, but then I started working on other things on the side and found out that i was way more interested in that than the one I was originally going to work on. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do, but I'm looking into the new, exciting project right now because I think it will be a better way for me to display skills in areas that I'm interested in, rather than work on a project that I think should exist, but isn't the type of coding that I'm interested in (oh my god. back end. god help me if I have to do a ton of front end coding in my career).

We talked a bit about other projects that people have done during the 5 weeks leading up to career day, and one thing that came up was called Flattest Route, which works with the Google Maps API to determine which is the least hill-climby route you can take to get from point A to point B. As an example, here's my walk from the bus stop to the house we're staying in. The route is color coded to indicate the steepness. Green is easy, yellow is moderate, blue is difficult, red is very difficult, and black is basically mountain climbing.

Sometimes I wonder if i should get crampons to walk up this hill.

The other super awesome thing that happened was that I got to meet up with a friend from high school at lunch. We're going to be on a hackathon team this weekend to try to best display asteroid data for fun and not profit. Hopefully we'll be able to hack something together that looks awesome and is super informative.

Not these gnomes either