Week 4: Going Round The Houses

 

I’m currently learning how to connect an app to a database using MongoDB which is a ‘document’ database. Apparently, these document databases have a lower complexity compared to ‘relational’ databases.

Well, I’m glad about that because I’ve had a right old time of it setting myself up with Mongo.

I’ve spent the best part of 2 days on this and got in such a mess I even had to set up a new email address to do it. I’m worried Mongo might contact me on suspicion of fraud due to the number of times I tried to set up a new account with them after mucking up the one I previously set up.

I have a bad habit of clicking on things before properly looking, reading or thinking things through. This definitely isn’t an asset if you’re trying to learn web development, as I’m discovering.

While learning how to code I’m also having to work on my anger management, as trying to find errors is very frustrating and can lead quite quickly to the red mists descending. The first time this happened to me was in the early days of trying to use CSS to style a web page. I wanted to have some headline in a nice bright pink colour, so I thought the easiest way would be to use the built in colour property called ‘fuschia’. Now, writing this in Word I can clearly see that it is a spelling mistake. But it took me a long time to figure that out back then as  ‘fuchsia’ just looks all wrong to me – and still does!!

But I understand that computers have to be very strict on these things and you can’t fudge something, which I suppose is part of the appeal. And when you get something right and the code works – well it all seems worth it.

I hope this is true, as Mr Gale has just said to me – when I punched the air in victory , having connected to my test database with my third alias – ‘you went round the houses with that one.’ Before adding  ‘And I felt like I was driving the bus.’ It was lucky it was a bus, as there was quite a few of me on it…..