Labs Week 1: A Review

As we complete the first week of Labs at Lambda School there is quite a bit to reflect on. As a team we planned out our project in the product canvas document and got both the front end and back end up and running.

During the first week I setup an AWS account and created a MySQL database running. Used MySQLWorkbench to build out the tables needed along with the foreign keys that it required. While I did spend most of my time troubleshooting AWS connection and table issues I was able to contribute to the front end. Once we had Auth0 setup I added the ability to logout via the profile page. For both the front end and back end I setup some of the environment variables that would be needed and setup the necessary variables on Heroku and Netlify to simplify deployment between local and web.

The ticket that i worked on the most this week was the setup of the database on AWS. Having never worked with AWS or MySQL, it was a great experience and would use it again. The following is a brief view of the MySQLWorkbench of the database.

Some of the issues I ran into early on was that i could access the database but nobody else on the team could through the workbench and we couldn't access it via the codebase. After doing research on the issue I realized it was a permission issue on what IP's were allowed to connect to the database. After digging through the AWS settings I was able to open it up to allow the other members to access it as well as the codebase.

Once the database was open this allowed the project to really start moving with seeding data and writing out components to display the data through API endpoints.

Our team as a whole did a great job with research and writing the project specification. I personally helped find a competitor (https://www.cronote.com/) and assisted with the writing of the epics/features and the user stories that go along with them. The biggest contribution was researching and investigation the database we would eventually use. We knew how to use SQLite and Postgres from previous projects at Lambda. I personally wanted to go outside of our comfort zone and use an industry tool like AWS to build our application on.