An Experiment in Scotch

Today has been far more pro­duc­tive than the last two com­bined. I jumped back into Python and SQLAlchemy, work­ing on a pet project to har­vest and ana­lyze NBA sta­tis­tics. The more I work with SQLAlchemy, the more I’m impressed with it. I’ve never done any work with NHiber­nate on the .net side of things but I really enjoy the map­ping func­tion­al­ity that SQLAlchemy pro­vides on top of the data base layer. It’s so much more plea­sur­able to write a few lines of code and let a solid frame­work han­dle the all the ORM crap.

I’ve got a Post­greSQL data­base run­ning here at home that I plan to stick sta­tis­tics into from the web. Once I’ve got the frame­work for that done and work­ing includ­ing the nightly scrap­ing of box score infor­ma­tion, I’ll begin work­ing on a web site front end to query that data in a vari­ety of ways.

The more code I write, the eas­ier it is to get into it. After such a long time of work­ing for 15 min­utes at a time at Bill­ma­trix, it’s nice to get into some­thing for 2–3 hours. It’s get­ting much eas­ier to focus and stay focused. I expect tomor­row will be another incre­men­tal step in that direction.