What did you learn today?

I learned about Sequelize, a node module that serves as an ORM (object-relational mapping) to interact between JavaScript code and databases. It abstracts away much of the work for running complex SQL queries against a database and unpacking values for storage (as compared with node’s mySQL).

My pair and I worked through the sprint and had strong ideas for the implementation after looking over the Sequelize docs. We implemented the messages get and post requests, and called it a day by watching the solution lecture. In our debrief of working together, my pair said that this was the first time he’s gotten close to the code in the solution video. I was proud of our work together, and I agreed that we did a great job of only writing code that was necessary. We tried to think through the modularity of the code and how we might reuse functions. We could improve our code by refactoring a couple lines of code that are used across all the requests, and I’m leaving that refactoring as an exercise to review for Monday’s self-assessment.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

Yet again, I need to be more patient and careful when looking through documentation. I need to be fearless about experimenting rather than saying to myself, “I don’t know how to do this.” I simply don’t know how to do something in code yet.

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

We start learning about express, deployment, and angular in the fifth week! I’m excited about all of this content. I feel like all the pieces are starting to fit together. I want to make sure I take time to review last week’s concepts.