In an effort to hold myself accountable for my own journey, I’m excited to write part two. study What I want to do instead of jumping into a project and getting lost in tutorials. I hope my patience pays off.
Code Academy
I took advantage of Code Academy’s free course and completed “Introduction to Back-End Programming” and “Learn Node.js Basics”. This was necessary for me because I had done React projects and other Node projects before, but I never really understood what I was doing with Node. These courses definitely helped me gain the basic understanding I needed. My brain always works the way I need to understand Why Something to make it click. I can’t just be told what to do, my brain needs to make sense of it in order to fully adapt to me.
In fact, I love these so much that I took advantage of the current 50% off holiday deal and signed up for a year. I like that they break the material into chunks and give you exercises to test your understanding. This is an excellent and intuitive learning tool. The mobile app is great too. No matter what topic you want to learn, you can replace some of the mindless scrolling with some flash card content. I’m not even sponsored or paid for it, but I highly recommend everyone check it out.
Express and middleware
In my Google query “How to connect React components to a SQL database”, I learned that I needed another technology on top of Node and React. I also finally understood what the “E” stood for in certain stacks (MERN, MEAN, etc.) and why so many different frameworks were needed.
So, with my new Code Academy account, I’ve been taking Express courses to keep up with my new self. I’m about 50% done with Learn Express and feel confident and ready to tackle the next part of my college football dynasty project.
SQLite query
On the more boring side, I’ve imported almost all of my data from Google Sheets (Review previous failed attempts to use Google spreadsheets as a database). I’m proud of how clean the table and data look (so far).
I’m also learning SQL while trying to fully understand the best way to join tables and extract the data I need for my project. I believe I can learn it on the fly as it makes sense, I just need to understand the grammar better.
My biggest SQL achievement so far is that I am able to extract a team’s total wins, total losses, intra-conference wins, and intra-conference losses from 1 specific season. I have a huge table that records every game in the league, with columns for team, score, game type (playoffs, regular season, etc.). Here is my query and what it returns:
SELECT COUNT(CASE WHEN (home_id='53' AND home_score > away_score) OR (away_id='53' AND away_score > home_score)THEN 1 END) AS Wins,
COUNT(CASE WHEN (home_id='53' AND home_score < away_score) OR (away_id='53' AND away_score < home_score)THEN 1 END) AS Losses,
COUNT(CASE WHEN game_type LIKE '%Conference Play%' AND ((home_id='53' AND home_score > away_score) OR (away_id='53' AND away_score > home_score))THEN 1 END) AS Conf_Wins,
COUNT(CASE WHEN game_type LIKE '%Conference Play%' AND ((home_id='53' AND home_score < away_score) OR (away_id='53' AND away_score < home_score))THEN 1 END) AS Conf_Losses
FROM matches
Probably very simple SQL, but it does give me confidence that I will be able to extract the information that my website actually needs.
Next
I will continue to complete my Express course, and then I will officially start this project. I just want to show a dynamic list of all teams and members in the league to get started. I’ll build the feature and team pages from there! I feel like once my environment is set up and I’m confident in extracting the data I need, the website will go up quickly since my expertise is in HTML/CSS.