Learning SQL Was a Game-Changer for Me!

March 5, 2025

Hey there! So, I’m super excited to share my journey with SQL because, honestly, it’s been a total game-changer for me as a beginner programmer. I started learning SQL a few months ago, and at first, I was like, “What are all these tables and queries?” But once I got the hang of it, it felt like I unlocked a superpower for working with data!

When I began, I was working on a small project where I had to organize a bunch of customer feedback data. Think like, names, comments, and ratings from thousands of people. Doing this in Excel was a nightmare—my laptop was so slow! Then my professor introduced me to SQL, and I was amazed at how I could just write a query like SELECT * FROM customers WHERE rating > 4; and boom, I had all the happy customers’ data in seconds.

One thing I struggled with was joins. Like, what’s the difference between LEFT JOIN and INNER JOIN? I kept mixing them up, and my queries gave me weird results. I spent a whole weekend watching YouTube tutorials and practicing with a sample database of books. I wrote queries to find books by certain authors or genres, and it finally clicked! For example, I used SELECT books.title, authors.name FROM books INNER JOIN authors ON books.author_id = authors.id; to match books with their authors. It felt so cool to see the data come together.

For my SQL Book Viewer project, I built a little web app where users can search a database of books. I used SQL to create tables and query them, and I connected it to a simple webpage with HTML and JavaScript. It’s not perfect, but seeing my queries actually work on a real webpage was so rewarding. I learned that SQL is awesome for organizing data, but you have to be careful with your queries to avoid slowing things down. I accidentally wrote a query that took forever because I forgot to filter properly—lesson learned!

If you’re just starting with SQL, my advice is to practice with small datasets and don’t be afraid to mess up. Also, tools like MySQL Workbench or SQLite are great for beginners. SQL is like a puzzle, and once you solve it, you feel like a data wizard. I’m still learning, but I’m so pumped to keep exploring how SQL can help me as a data analyst!

Python Is My New Best Friend for Data Analysis

March 3, 2025

Okay, so I have to tell you about Python because it’s honestly become my favorite tool for data analysis. I started learning it last semester, and at first, I was intimidated because coding seemed so complicated. But Python is actually pretty friendly, especially for beginners like me, and it’s made my data projects so much easier.

I began with simple stuff, like printing “Hello, World!” and doing basic math. Then I discovered libraries like Pandas and Matplotlib, and that’s when things got exciting. For example, I was working on my MP3 Player Data Analyzer project, where I wanted to analyze my music listening habits. I had a folder of MP3 files, and I used Python to read their metadata—like song names, artists, and play counts. I used Pandas to put all that data into a table (they call it a DataFrame), and it was so much easier than messing around in Excel.

One thing I learned the hard way was dealing with messy data. Some of my MP3 files had missing tags, and my code kept crashing. I had to figure out how to handle those errors, like using try/except blocks. It took me a few tries, but I got it working, and I even made a chart with Matplotlib to show which artists I listened to the most. Seeing that bar chart pop up on my screen was like, “Whoa, I made this!”

I also used Python for my Data Cleaning Script project. I had a dataset with customer feedback, but it had duplicates and some empty rows. Writing a Python script to clean it up was so satisfying. I used Pandas commands like drop_duplicates() and dropna(), and suddenly my data was neat and ready for analysis. I even wrote a little script to export the cleaned data to a CSV file, which I could then use in Tableau or SQL.

My biggest tip for beginners is to start small and play around with Python in a Jupyter Notebook. It’s awesome because you can run your code line by line and see what happens. Also, don’t be scared of errors—they’re just part of learning. Python has so many possibilities for data analysis, and I’m excited to keep learning more, maybe even try some machine learning next!

Building My First Web App with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

March 1, 2025

Hi everyone! I want to share my experience building my first web app because it was such a fun (and sometimes frustrating) journey. I’m new to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I decided to dive in and create something for my portfolio. Spoiler alert: it’s not as scary as it sounds, and I learned a ton!

I started with my SQL Book Viewer project, where I wanted to make a webpage that lets people search a database of books. HTML was the first thing I tackled, and it’s like the skeleton of a webpage. I learned to create elements like <div> and <input> to build a search bar and a table for results. At first, my page looked super plain, and I was like, “This is not cool.” That’s where CSS came in.

CSS was so much fun because it’s like decorating your webpage. I played around with colors, fonts, and layouts to make my app look nice. I used display: flex; to arrange my search bar and results side by side, but I kept breaking the layout by accident. I spent hours tweaking margins and padding, and I learned that CSS can be picky! One tiny mistake, like forgetting a semicolon, and everything looks weird.

JavaScript was the hardest part because it makes the webpage interactive. I wanted users to type a book title and see results from my SQL database. I used JavaScript to send the search term to a backend (I used a simple server with Node.js, which I’m still learning). At first, my search button did nothing, and I was so confused. I found out I forgot to add an event listener, so I added button.addEventListener('click', searchBooks);, and it finally worked! Seeing the book titles pop up on the page was such a victory.

I also worked on my Chrome Data Input & Google Sheets Exporter project, which uses JavaScript to grab data from a webpage and send it to Google Sheets. Learning about APIs was mind-blowing—I had no idea you could connect a webpage to Google Sheets like that. I struggled with the API authentication part, but following a tutorial helped me get it working.

My advice for beginners is to start with a simple webpage, like a personal portfolio, and experiment with HTML and CSS first. Then add JavaScript to make it interactive. Free resources like W3Schools and MDN Web Docs were lifesavers for me. Building a web app is like putting together a puzzle, and even if it’s not perfect, you’ll learn so much. I’m already planning my next web project, maybe something with more animations!