Things that make you wonder

I connected my project to MongoDB. Nice and easy. 

The tutorial shows what happens if there is an error in the .env file. 

I duplicate it, changing the url in the .env file, and stop nodemon from running, as nodemon does not rerun if you make changes to .env files. 

I start it back up, and it crashes as expected. 

I fix the url, and start it back up. 

It crashes. 

Using that weird logic that says "What if you do this semi-random thing?" and added a space at the end of a line in a non .env file. 

Boom! it runs. 

I remove that useless space. 

It crashes. 

I feel like I need a comment that says "Leave this space alone. If you remove it the system crashes. We have no idea why". 

Also, I am getting a lot out of this tutorial by Raddy: 

MERN Starter Tutorial for Beginners - https://youtu.be/0osXx2oJu44

Being a teacher... again

 Woke up, started the coffee, sat down at the computer. 

"Hey, I might be building an app for someone. How do I set up a full-stack project? Like, what did you use to set that up?" 

::: Blink blink :::

So I am trying to walk them through that on a high level. 

Coding is a rollercoaster

 Coding is a rollercoaster.

The long slow climb uphill as you try to make a thing work, the silly joy of "I got a different error message!", but then finally there is that moment when you hit the top, hands in the air, screaming like an idiot "It says 1! It says 1!" as you dance around the room.

 
Or is that just me? 

Never assume malice

 "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. Never assume stupidity when ignorance will suffice. Never assume ignorance when forgivable error will suffice. Never assume error when information you hadn't adequately accounted for will suffice." - rwallace expanding on Hanlons Razor

I asked someone if they had forgotten to push the second part to the repo, because it has been 14hrs. 1) Always check that you pushed all the parts. 2) If you have gone down that list and not checked off any of those as being the reason things are wrong, you have big problems. Praise them in public, criticize/coach them in private. And expect the same from others.

Coding Pool Party

 I'll admit that having Java in one folder, JavaScript in another, and MySQL next door, all happily communicating back and forth is pretty nice, but also not 100% clicking in my brain.

I get that they both can send messages to the database, it is the part where the JavaScript frontend says "Hey, can you throw me a beer?", and Java says "Let me grab it out of the db cooler"...

Wait, I think that is how it works... They are just yelling at everyone, and everyone who can do that does it, and if you can't do it, you just ignore it.

And now all my code is getting hammered, sunburned, and falling in the pool.

The Postman always Bings twice

 I spent way too long yesterday failing to spot that I was missing a comma. A combination of never having used Postman before, and the font in Postman being tiny. 

A quick search told me how to make the font bigger... which Postman does by making everything bigger as it is a zoom. Different. 

Now that I've used it for a bit I can see it is going to be something I use often. Noticed they have a Trello API which falls in line with a project I want to put together someday. 

Meeting tonight with the group, hoping to nail some more of the ideas, concepts, and designs to the wall. Also really hoping that the TA puts up the repo that they told us would be up 2 days ago. 

Still trying to figure out how I seem to be the leader of the group. People keep coming to me for what is it going to do, how will it do it, and what should it look like. An inventory system wasn't my idea. But I will admit that a Yelp-type app for dispensaries might have been more than we could handle in the time we have. But we could have gotten a MVP up, and then expanded it later. Who knows, maybe I'll put it together, drag in some friends who code, make it an Android app, and try to figure out how to make some money off it. Seems like there would be a market for such. 

Pretty Doesn't Return Value

 Our instructor told us on Monday that pretty doesn't return value.

Last night's session on wireframes was a perfect example of that.

Every minute of the TA putting something in place was followed by 5 minutes of making it pretty. The hour was around 10 minutes of putting stuff in place and 50 minutes of moving stuff around... They would do something and then 10 minutes later have to touch the same things again because they wanted more room, and it was all made more difficult because they didn't attach the lines to the shapes, because "I don't like how it looks".

Get all the parts together, then arrange them as you want to see them, and let the system handle the lines.

All we students wanted was to be sure we were doing wireframes right. We wanted to get a handle on some of the thinking that went with how they are made.

What we got was frustrated & annoyed.