Weeks 42, 43, 44, & 45

 A whole month without a journal entry! I must be slipping! Or maybe I was having too much fun with some of the projects they were having us do these past few weeks. First there was making that Rick and Morty character search tool using an API, then there was me making my first real foray into Dungeons and Dragons with a companion app that allows users to look up spells and monsters on the fly. There were a couple of express apps as well, like a solar system viewer. Complete with a NASA picture of the day page. And just yesterday I finished an inspirational quote database interface that allows users to add additional quotes and authors as well as modify and remove ones already present in the DB. I'll admit, it's been just as much fun getting some of these to work properly as it is making them look nice with the help of both bootstrap and css code. Although the quote finder project was the most frustrating project thus far. Not for the code or styling, but for the database I was using. 

It "expired" part way through the project's development halfway through without any sort of warning and I was left high and dry. Trying to get another DB didn't get anywhere either. The one recommended by the instructor wouldn't let me complete the set up process for inexplicable reasons, and all the other so-called 'free' ones had charges hidden away. 20 tabs and a whole load of nonsense later, the TA intervened and set up a fresh DB for me. If this is the headache that comes standard with full-stack programming roles, I'm not looking forward to it. 

Speak of, I'm part of a group for the final project for this course, and we're doing a sort of 'bookshelf' app. A tool that allows users to organize and manage their personal book collections. They can categorize them, rate them and update reading status. Apparently this group had used the idea for a final project in a previous course in the program, so they already got the idea locked down. At this point, I'd be happy just to be involved. 

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