Hacktoberfest Night! & Database Planning

Today I started working on open sourcing my project for Hacktoberfest. There were a few more things that anticipated that I need to do to welcome contributors. Namely:

Add a code of conduct
Add a license, not just refer to it in package.json
Add a contribution guide
Add a pull request template
Add an issue template
Improve the instructions for local installment.

Of course before getting started on any of that, I found a bug in the project! Serious lolz. So I got nothing open source -related done, but at least implemented & deployed the new currency support I added so that it’s on the live version of the site.

For when I get back to it, here are some templates that were recommended to me at tonight’s Hacktoberfest coding event:

Definitely Typed has good examples of issue templates
Dot-Github has basic templates

Octocats!

I’m not a big fan of stickers but I love the Octocats! It’s great when GitHub hosts an event because they always have new fun ones. My favorite one from tonight is wearing lederhosen 😄

GFT Database Planning

Yesterday I learned that arrays and JSON are valid data types in PostgreSQL. That’s great news! I had decided on using a Postgres database for my GFT project, but realized that one of the pieces of data (the list of cast or characters appearing in a show) will never be in a consistent format or length. That’s one area where a db like MongoDB would have no issues.

I considered doing one giant table of “characters” and one giant table of “actors” and then can do a join to assign the actors to the different roles. However those queries would certainly take a long time especially when the database grows quite large. In that case a lookup to a specific show would be way more efficient (in my somewhat ignorant-to-this-topic mind).

So I considered adding a second database, adding MongoDB for the cast lists, and using Postgres for the majority of the site’s other data. But then I learned Postgres can take JSON objects as a table entry, so maybe I can figure out a way to still get everything in one? I still need to look up how I would actually query the individual attributes of a JSON object nested in a table, but assuming I can learn about that, this could be the solution. So a bit more work to be done in that respect.

Other Stuff

We watched First Man today at work…it was so gooood!! They definitely went a bit heavy on the story exposition (well, ‘heavy’ may be the wrong word…it is an entertainment film after all) but all the space stuff and progress of the lunar missions was so cool to watch. Well actually, they skipped over a lot of those missions too…..anyway the film was great! Especially after seeing the Saturn V rocket in Houston last week 😍🤓😍

Up Next

Checking out the Tolkien Middle Earth exhibition this weekend! Will be nice to go out to Oxford for a bit in addition to seeing the exhibition.

And then lots of coding work to do!