23 Aug Christian Lindler, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Week 14

Hello! This was the final week of my internship with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and it was a hectic one. With a ways to go on my project, I had to condense a lot of learning into a very short period of time. I was able to get a database working and using psycopg2 I was able to send data from my program to the database. This went relatively quickly and I then moved on to the web side of my project.

My goal was to essentially get my program to pull data from my database and write a custom HTML file containing this data and open it using a web browser. It took me a while to wrap my head around this, but eventually I was able to get an HTML file containing a simple graph of my data to show up in Firefox. Finally, I had to make the website look a bit nicer.

Though we touched on HTML and CSS (languages for web design) in AP computer science, I didn’t have nearly enough knowledge to make anything that looked even remotely aesthetically appealing. I frantically searched for tutorials to help my situation. Though in the end my website was by no means good, it was at least tolerable to look at. I made a quick PowerPoint presentation, and on Friday I showed my project to the rest of the trainees.

Finished game

Finished Website

Overall, this internship has been by far the most academically challenging thing I have ever done. I learned an incredible amount in such a short period of time and I am coming out of it knowing probably 1000 times more about computer programming than I did before.

Most of all, however, I learned how much there is that I don’t know and I believe that is very valuable. I am really grateful to David, Pinhead, and LASP for the opportunity to have done this as it has definitely been extremely impactful in my learning of computer science.