This week in Software Engineering, we discussed commonly used regular expressions in Python before jumping into sql. We learned how to use mysql to create tables, insert data, and select data using where clauses and joins. This applied what we learned about selections and projections in relational algebra.

In addition, we had a speaker from Mutual Mobile talk to us about open source. The speaker worked on several iOS projects that ended up being open sourced as well as used other open source projects in his projects. He also encouraged us to contribute to open source, starting with projects that we already use.

We also started phase 2 of the IDB project this week. So far, we finished collecting the rest of the data. We’re currently working on adding the data into the database, creating the RESTful API by querying that data, and using React or Angular for a dynamic frontend. So far, we’ve only been able to get the legislator data into the database since there have been a couple of issues with foreign keys, but once all the data is in, the rest of the backend should be simple to complete.

For the software tip of the week, you can use Blueprints to separate routes into multiple files. This is useful for having separate files for related sets of routes in larger projects, such as routes for website pages and the API. You can even define the url prefix for a set of routes instead of, for example, typing ‘/api/v1’ for every route.