While thinking about the next topic to write about, I played around with the idea of building a project and incorporating GraphQL. Branching into more APIs, I thought it would be the perfect fit. But then I realized how little I knew about GraphQL. Although knowing the context and recognizing the name, I know very little about the language. Looking back further, I realize that in the past, when discussing different languages and frameworks I would often mention GraphQL, and yet never took the time to dig into what exactly it is and how to properly implement it.

After a…

Plex is a client-server media player that can be used to stream videos, play music, watch live TV, listen to podcasts and so much more. It also does a wonderful job of organizing your personal media files as well as photos into collections. The player even has its own mobile app and can be run on many devices including a Raspberry Pi. But what if you’re one of those people who likes to learn and builds everything they use from scratch (I sometimes get this way)? …

As a change of pace, I decided to take a trip back to Databases. This time though, I wanted to do a little comparison instead of another tutorial-style post. Thinking about my time in college, I remember a particular class where we discussed using either MySQL or SQLite. In the end, we used SQLite due to the portability, but this got me thinking. The conversation would suggest that MySQL and SQLite were very similar, however, I know that is not the case. So how are they different? And are there any areas they are very similar? So in this post…

A few years ago, I wanted to build a note-taking web application in an attempt to lighten the load of my backpack when walking around my college campus. Wanting to try something really different, Django was chosen. Unfortunately, after getting everything installed, following some tutorials, and starting to code, I immediately ran into problems. To start, the documentation on Django’s website did not match the version that installed on my computer (this was causing problems with what I was looking to accomplish). Which was a little confusing since I had followed that site's steps to install Django. The other problem…

While branching out to coding games, I’m currently trying to stay oriented around Python. But I wanted something either two-dimensional or three-dimensional instead of text-based this time. In my research, I found out about an engine called Ren’Py. Although not command-line nor VS Code, my usual choices for development, Ren’Py uses its custom engine for development.

Lately, I have been thinking about creating a novel-styled game with interaction. Like a choose-your-own-adventure type of game. Even without a full concept, I would need to know what I’m able to do, and how I can build the game. …

Previously on MongoDB

In part five, we learned about how to update documents using a few different Mongo commands. We also discussed that due to having embedded documents, it would be a little more difficult to update because of the chance details are overwritten. While updating, we learned we could update every field, or we could update only specific ones. Once we discussed a few different methods of updating, we decided to take a little time to think about how we would want to update our FastAPI portion.

This Time on MongoDB

Having taken a little time, I decided how I want to update our documents. Keep…

When I finished writing my previous post, I spent some time thinking about the hundreds of pictures sitting in a single directory on my Samba share. When I first placed them there, I had this dream that one day, they would be neatly organized into separate directories. However, the thought of having to view each one individually and then move it to its proper directory seemed like a painful task. That is until I realized that a couple of MySQL tables and a little Python code could really help speed up this tedious task.

The idea that I had in…

A few months ago, I wrote a few MYSQL tables to use while learning to create JSON web tokens with a Python API. A fairly simple task, however, recently it was brought to my attention that I made a mistake. For the primary key, I used a CHAR value that would represent a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier). Because MYSQL does not have a GUID datatype, I selected to use the CHAR data type to hold my generated value. This way, the database was not required to generate the key, as it would be created in my backend code. Although this…