This will be the last blog post I write for my capstone course at OSU! My experience working on the project so far has been great. My work has mostly been on the back end of our project, and I’d like to share a couple results from that effort. My first task was writing up a database outline to define the entities and attributes that would need to be present in our app’s database. From there, I created the tables in MySQL Workbench and developed a schema from that which is included below!

You can see the 4 entities in our database, their relationship to one another, and the different pieces of data each table holds. I was initially struggling with how to store data relating to the swipes that users will make when perusing the animals up for adoption, as we need to be able to retrieve animals they have matched with. I settled on the “Swipes” intersection table. Each swipe will be associated with the relevant user and animal id number, as well as the direction of the swipe made! I was pretty proud of this database design decision.

Next, the specifications of this assignment wanted me to chat a bit about how I approach learning something new, and how I progress through being stuck on a problem. When learning something new I typically look to documentation and example code first. If I can first seek a beginner level of comprehension with the new technology, starting the actual programming becomes much easier. When stuck on a problem I typically first go back to some solid references I’ve found to double check my code against. From there, it’s a process of trial and error, where I change small sections of code and rerun it to see how the changes have taken effect.

If you happen to have read along with any of these blog posts, thanks! I’ll see you in the next one!