Baby Steps

A friend of mine had some trouble transitioning from her community college to a four year one. Right now she is in limbo. Looks like she is reading books and playing video games. That is fun for a while. But I think she should be working on personal development projects.

I decided to work on some side projects with my friend to motivate her to start writing code again. She had an idea for a fiction database. She tried to do it once. But her queries were not working and she gave up. That is so not like her.

My first idea was for us to produce a minimum viable product (MVP) for her fiction database. I helped trim the specs down to a bare bones app. I cooked up a simple single database table to hold the data. Then I reviewed the SQL needed to get records of interest from that table. That's when I saw my friend had some trouble constructing the WHERE clause.

With the SQL confusion resolved, my friend banged out the app. I was happy. We decided to write the app in PHP and use MySQL on the back end. Next step is to modify the app to work with her more complicated database schema. We have the basics down. Moving forward should be easy.