Week 1 workshop

Hi again!

The workshop on Saturday covered: setting up AWS, using Git, PHP, MySQL, Javascript and AJAX.

I really respect how much effort our seniors put in for our workshop. There were even seniors who weren't giving a presentation but there to just offer behind the scenes help.

Setting up AWS: It would have been a painful process without the help of Su Yuen guiding us through and with a installation guide on IVLE. For me, I just followed the steps through blindly, I guess it wouldn't be too important to know exactly about the various settings and options for now? At first I was quite grossed out by the looooong public dns, but since its provided free, maybe thats why hmm.

When the Git session got going, I was abit blur at first, wondering how he got his command line (I was typing  vigorously into my cmd prompt and nothing interesting was happening). Then I opened the Git GUI. Luckily I was clicking around randomly and "hey whats this?" - I found where to get the command shell. (Select repository -> Click tools -> Open a shell here) 

But my judgement is that its better to stick to the GUI. I feel that the important features can be easily accessed with the GUI and we don't have to memorise the commands this way. 

We had a good lunch break, I liked the food!

The workshop continued with Javascript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL. The important takeaway is that its not difficult to pick it up as a beginner given that I had some programming background in CEG and my past internship. But to truly build something awesome is another thing altogether. Resourcefulness + creativity + hardwork. I was not following too much since I read the slides the day before. Instead I was trying to use Eclipse after installing the PHP package. Since I had installed my own local server, I was trying to write PHP commands to access the database and fetch some data. I got stuck and decided to go back home and try to fix it.

So that night, after traveling 234923974829 miles home to (the land of ) tanah merah, I finally got apache working and my database can be accessed! (: (: (:

But I'm not 100% satisfied. The thing is that this database that I'm accessing right now is my own localhost which is the home server (which should be used for testing purposes). But how about the database that I created with AWS? How do I write the MySQL connection to access the online server? I will work on this after I publish this post. I welcome any inputs, please comment below! (:

~Pei Yi