February 9-11

Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 1:25-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47

     The majority of the beginning of this week has been dedicated to app work. We are now starting to integrate the data scraping algorithms with the database we have set up to facilitate the app. This way, the scraping doesn't need to be done every time the app runs, which will cut down on loading time for users. We are also continuing the scraping code itself. We have started to scrape the information for which clubs are during which weeks, and are making sure that the information we collect via beautifulSoup is indeed the information we want and will continue to be the correct information every time we run the Python code. The difficult situation we are facing now is that the database we are using may not be integrable with Python. It has API's for multiple languages, but we are not sure that Python is one of them. There are a few interesting ways around this issue. For example, we are toying with the idea of embedding other languages within our Python code so that those languages can run the necessary code to instantiate the database and upload new data to it. The next step will be integrating the data we scraped and stored into the HTML we have for each page in the app.
     On Wednesday, my colleague, my mentor and I got together to talk about some of our future plans. The student tech team will be starting up shortly, and we have to get an idea of everyone's schedules in order to do so. We also talked about the different things that the tech team could do. The idea of allowing students to run a help desk during school hours was thrown out, and will likely be implemented in following years. Another school in the area has an already-established student help desk that we can pull ideas from. I, unfortunately, will not be able to participate in that, but I will get to pave the way for it to be possible. With my time left in high school running surprisingly short, I hope that I will be able to see some of these exciting changes come about before my time is up.