Day 1 - IDE & DB

I’ll expand on this tomorrow later, but I’ve got the IDE setup, the local database server, and the database is designed.

Edit: September 28, 2013.

So much for “tomorrow”, from now on I’m going to use “later.”

Anyway, to explain what this meant.

    When a person is developing code they can really use whatever methodology they want to keep track of their files and projects. Some people decide they want to do everything from a text console using command line. Others decide to use text files that they edit in a text editor. Another group like to use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I’m part of the last group. Since I’m going to be programming a backend app in java, and apps for iOS and Android, the IDEs that I’m going to end up using are Eclipse for the java backend, Xcode for the iOS app(s), and Android Studio for Android.

For my database I’m currently going to use the default install of MySQL, but try to make the data layer abstract enough that I can quickly switch to other solutions if the application becomes too large for MySQL.

As for the design, I learned a bit of this in school and while doing QA, development, and support for a large medical company’s online application. Plus it’s one of my favorite skills that doesn’t get exercised enough. Since the design of the database drives a lot of the development it’s done first and seldom changed, and improvements tend to focus on speeding up the application given the existing design of the database.