Anyone (everyone?) who has ever tried to learn a programming language knows that to really learn, you need a project.
I’m a DBA by trade and as such…haven’t really spent that much time learning programming languages so over the last year I’ve been playing around with a couple of projects using Python and Go. AI is everywhere at the moment so I thought I’d throw that in there because, well, why not?
So here I thought I’d briefly show two projects that when I have some free time (ha ha ha) I bounce from error to error with.
I’ve linked the gihub repos here as well…so you can have a look at the code (be kind). One thing I will admit to from the start…ChatGPT has 100% been used. And why not?
It’s a tool that’s available, and allows someone like me to get something working that I can then improve on. Although I will say…it doesn’t half spit out some rubbish sometimes…I think I’ve spent most of my time working out why the code it generates doesn’t work!
But, eventually, I got a both projects into a working demo state…so here they are!
Prusk-sql
The first one is a command line tool to connect to a SQL instance in a container, display the SQL version, and have an optional flag to list the databases.
OK, so there are other (better) tools out there to do this BUT this came around as I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with Helm and Kubernetes, both of which are written in Go…so I thought I’d learn a little bit!
When I’m testing SQL Server in Kubernetes/containers the first thing I do is confirm the instance is up and running by retrieving the SQL version and then list the databases present. So this helps by combining those checks into an easy one-liner…
https://github.com/dbafromthecold/prusk-sql
Burrito-Bot
If I didn’t know what I was doing with prusk-sql, I really don’t know what I’m doing here!
The idea is to have a chat bot that I can ask for burrito recommendations (I know, I know…niche or what?). The basic plan is to load data from Yelp from all restaurants in a city (starting with Dublin…but soon…THE WORLD…or maybe Cork) and then ping an LLM to respond to any input from the user.
And it works! Kinda…there’s a lot of work to be done here. I want to strip out pretty much all of the existing code and replace with something like python ChatterBot. I also need to work out how I can get it to give me recommendations for restaurants in a specific area of the city.
But for now, I’m just happy that it doesn’t spam errors!
https://github.com/dbafromthecold/burrito-bot
Anyhoo, those are the two projects I’ve been dabbling with…I hope that you are having fun with your side projects. May your errors be clear and actually point to the problem 
Thanks for reading!