Login & Data Models & Grit

First up today, I was glad to get the login working on my value app. When I used the register form to create a new user, I could see in the Mongo command line that the user had been created, but in the browser I got an error 400 Bad Request. The error was caused by the field names I was using in the form; The npm package I’m using passport-local by default names the login fields username and password but instead of username, my field was named email. Once I changed it, it worked fine and routed correctly. It’s also possible to pass in the names of the field you want passport-local to consider as the username & password fields per the docs.

Rethinking Data Models

Next up was changing my schema models to reference each other; ultimately I want one document of things any user can choose from (and add to) to bring into their own list of things. I got the “global things” set up fine, and was working on referencing a globalThing from the user schema. I haven’t completely figured it out yet, but I did get the thing’s object ID to show up on the logged in user’s page, meaning it sees only the things belonging to that user and prints them. Now I just need it to print the actual array data instead of a random id number 8ac468230hgs08s!!

Other Stuff

I started on the book Grit by Angela Duckworth and I’m really enjoying it so far. I sometimes worry that I’m trying to do too many things at once (value app, CS50, MySQL course, Python intro, this blog, etc…for example), knowing that individually these things take a lot of time and attention so I need to cut the list down. And while that’s still true, one piece of encouragement I took from the book was that I am still going, which is a positive sign! It definitely hasn’t been all rainbows and lollipops, but it’s been nearly a year now that I’ve really be learning in earnest, and I still have as much excitement and drive around what I’m doing (maybe more) as I did when I started so that’s on the right track!

Up Next

It’s really encouraging and fun to see my app coming along that I can (literally) work on it all day. I need to make sure CS50 stays in the mix if I’m going to finish before year’s end.