Updates

Here are some small recent updates of mine!

I will be competing in the TSA Washington state conference in March in both of my events! My local chapter hosted a regional event with a couple of other chapters to determine which teams can proceed to compete in the state conference. In both of my events, I won again (I went to Nationals last year), and can now go to the state event. I am competing in the Software Development and Coding events. More information about all of the events can be found here.

A pin I won from winning at regional this year.

The collection of TSA related pins I’ve acquired, a WA state badge, a WA finalist pin, and this regional finalist pin.Unfortunately they did not give out pins for a national competitior.

 

Apologies for this hiatus, school has been piling up, and as such, I have had limited time to code. However, this past week, all of my classes have been out as a result of a large amount of snow here in Washington state. As a result, I have suddenly received 11 more hours each day, for three days! There is a large amount of snow here, but of course, it’s not nearly as bad as in Chicago.

That’s Lake Michigan!

With these 33 more hours, I’ve been hard at work doing one thing I’ve never had the chance to before: database management with SQL and PHP. It has been roughly 2 years since I’ve last used PHP, and as such, these 3 days have been spent learning and experimenting with mySQLi and PHP, which has been rough. Most online sources to learn the language use mySQL functions which have recently been depreciated in favor of mySQLi functions which have different parameter requirements, different return variables and more.

My little brother—whose website can be found at maxsiauw.com—is an avid speed cuber. Speed cubing competitions are those in which its competitors compete to solve Rubik’s cubes and other Rubik’s cube esc puzzles in the fastest time. The speed cubing community has roughly 120,000 members today, and a database of said users is publicly available as a SQL database. This gave me a perfect way to learn about database management and searching using mySQL, with a large database.

After these past few days, I have unfortunately made little progress, because of the issues addressed above, and the fact PHP and SQL feature unwieldy and illegible syntax, with Shakespearean literature such as  $query = mysqli_query($conn,“SELECT * FROM `wc_db` WHERE `name` LIKE ‘%$qname%'”);

 

That’s it for today, hopefully I’ll be able to add updates in this small project of mine.