#mysql

I HAVE BEEN STUCK ON THIS GODDAMN FINAL PROJECT FOR A WEEK, ON THE FIRST STEP!!!

I HAVE TRIED SO MANY DIFFERENT COMMANDS JUST TO GET THIS THING STARTED ONLY TO GET BACK ERROR AFTER ERROR AFTER ERROR

LAST NIGHT I DECIDED FUCK IT, I DON'T NEED A 4.0, KEEPING As IS NOT WORTH THIS AMOUNT OF SUFFERING. NO ONE ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT IF YOU GRADUATED WITH A 4.0 IT MEANS NOTHING

THIS MORNING I HAD A SUDDEN IDEA, HEY WAIT, THERE WAS ONE COMMAND I USED ON MY LAST PROJECT FOR SOMETHING SIMILAR, LEMME TRY THAT

If you work with a database and are asked to alter the table structure to comply in advance for citizenship or gender categorizations it's really important to NOT do it.

"The governor is concerned about all this stuff they want us to update our record keeping so we store both gender AND biological sex."

"We need fields to store the country of origin of people's parents."

If you don't have the power to rebuff this yourself, ask for help. At minimum ask for help online anonymously.

Depending on your job you probably have in the past made compromises. Maybe to keep your job. Maybe to survive. This is a bright line. If you are asked to be the one to update the table don't let it be your fingers typing those changes.

If you can't just say "No I won't do that." Stall, run away, feign incompetence. Just don't let it happen.

I suspect this might be where the rubber hits the road first for us around here.

Nothing has changed. You do not have to do it. It is not even ordained.

I know someone who rebuffed such a request. Boss was apologetic "it's what the higher ups want, oh *I* think it's a lot of nonsense, but I don't want us to be out of step ... blah blah"

It was proposed to them in sheepish way. They said it would be a lot of work, not add anything of value, and most important they would not do it. It didn't come up again.

Fascism can be the work of zealots, but there are also many sheepish middle management helping hands who "don't even believe in this really"

There is a lively discussion of this on mastodon. (Mastodon is a very active social network where many people who left twitter have gone over the past few years to escape many problems of big centralized socail media. I like it a lot.) Posting a response to this post over there could be a way to get lots of help and ideas from tech people all over the world with similar values. If you do need help. Please say something.

Also, if you respond to this post I can pass what you say along if that would help too. People will respond and give you ideas to NOT do this should you be asked.

EDIT: I noticed that this post ended up being reblogged by terfs. If you're transphobic this post is not for you to reblog. I want to celebrate everyone who is not a cis man in this industry, including trans women and nonbinary people in tech, and it was my mistake to only include cis women in this post when there are so many trans women and nonbinary people who have done great things in tech as well. Trans women are women and just as important.

Here you can read about trans ppl in tech, and please do:

https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628

The morning of women's day i attended a super inspiring seminar about being a woman in tech at a large tech company in my city, and now I'm inspired to share what I learned with all of you!

I didn't have time to finish this post on women's day, but it's not too late to post now: every day is a day to celebrate women!

Women actually laid the foundation for a lot of the tech industry.

For example, the first computer, ENIAC, was programmed completely by women! While men were the behind the scenes engineers, it was women who did all the actual programming of ENIAC.

The women who made up the team responsible for programming it were called Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances V. Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

I think one woman who is finally getting her overdue recognition is Ada Lovelace. She was a mathematician (also often referred to as the first programmer) who created the first algorithm in 1842, which wasn't recognized until 1953! However, since none of her machines were ever completed it was never tested in practice during her time.

She has since been celebrated by giants such as google, and she has given name to a programming language (Ada). She was also the first person to write about what is today known as AI. Back when she was practicing, computers were simply thought of as calculators. But she had an idea that if computers can understand numbers, then that can be translated to letters, and in turn that can lead to computers being able to handle words, and eventually even write, draw and create music.

Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress in the 40's, but she was also an inventor who laid ground for what we use today for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS services.

During WW2 she wanted to contribute positviely to the military efforts against the Nazis, and she tried to figure out how to radio control torpedoes. In 1942 she patented her technology "Secret Communications System", also known as frequency hopping, which laid the foundation for the technology we use today for Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. It wasn't until 1962 that it was first used for its intended purpose, during the cuban missile crisis.

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler, called A-0, in 1955, and was also part of the Univac team, which was the company also responsible for building ENIAC. She also initiated work on the COBOL programming language.

She was also the one to coin the term "bug" in 1947. Computers back then had lights to visualize their working process (which was also a womans idea to implement btw) and bugs would be attracted to the lights, but usually that was no issue - until a bug made its way into a tube which caused the computer to stop working. Hopper taped the bug to a piece of paper and logged what caused the crash - a bug.

Dorothy Vaughan (left), alongside colleagues such as Katherine Johnson (middle) and Mary Jackson (right), was a mathematician at NASA (called NACA when she started) who worked on the orbit for the first ever manned spaceflight and later also on Apollo 11 that would take humanity to the moon!

When Vaughan started at what was then called NACA, segregation was still prevalent in the US and she was not allowed in the same areas in the office as her white colleagues. Another department was formed for the black staff, and when the director of said department unexpectedly died, she was appointed as the new director and thus became the first ever black woman at that position at NACA/NASA. In 1958 when NACA becomes NASA segregation is forbidden, and that is when Vaughan and her colleagues Johnson and Jackson started working on programming the orbit and later also Apollo 11.

Continuing on the same track of NASA and space, Margaret Hamilton was the Apollo project's first actual programmer. Hamilton became the director of software engineering at NASA in 1965, and she was also the person to first coin the term !

In the image above, she stands next to all the handwritten code that was used to send humanity to the moon. During the early stages of the project when she would speak of "sofware engineering", software development was not taken as seriously as other forms of engineering, and it wasn't regarded as a science, either. She wanted to legitimize software development as an engineering discipline, and overtime the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline.

And lastly, if you're a woman in STEM, I want to highlight and celebrate you! Being a woman in a male dominated industry is not easy, we often suffer from sterotype threat and are not seen as our own individuals, but rather "the woman" in a room full of men. But just as these women, I'm sure you will achieve greatness!!

Here are some additional resources if you'd like to learn more:

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens-work-become-a-mans-world/

And this was mainly my source for this post, but it's unfortunately only available in Swedish:

Um dia, do fundo do meu coração, espero fazer dar certo .

In our previous database exploration journey, SQL Fundamentals #1: SQL Data Definition, we set the stage by introducing the "books" table nestled within our bookstore database. Currently, our table is empty, Looking like :

books

| title | author | genre | publishedYear | price |

Data manipulation

Now, let's embark on database interaction—data manipulation. This is where the magic happens, where our "books" table comes to life, and we finish our mission of data storage.

Inserting Data

Our initial task revolves around adding a collection of books into our "books" table. we want to add the book "The Great Gatsby" to our collection, authored F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here's how we express this in SQL:

INSERT INTO books(title, author, genre, publishedYear, price) VALUES('The Great Gatsby', 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'Classic', 1925, 10.99);

Alternatively, you can use a shorter form for inserting values, but be cautious as it relies on the order of columns in your table:

INSERT INTO books VALUES('The Great Gatsby', 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'Classic', 1925, 10.99);

Updating data

As time goes on, you might find the need to modify existing data in our "books" table. To accomplish this, we use the UPDATE command.For example :

UPDATE books SET price = 12.99 WHERE title = 'The Great Gatsby';

This SQL statement will locate the row with the title "The Great Gatsby" and modify its price to $12.99.

We'll discuss the where clause in (SQL fundamentals #3)

Deleting data

Sometimes, data becomes obsolete or irrelevant, and it's essential to remove it from our table. The DELETE FROM command allows us to delete entire rows from our table.For example :

DELETE FROM books WHERE title = 'Moby-Dick';

This SQL statement will find the row with the title "Moby-Dick" and remove it entirely from your "books" table.