Basics Done

Today is Valentine's Day, and I got to spend the whole day hanging out with my daughter, the best valentine I've ever had. We went shopping for flowers and chocolates for my fiancé, rode her little play bike outside for a while, and just hung out around the house. It was a really nice day off with her, and we had a great time. After she got up from her nap, we met my fiancé at a Mexican restaurant, nothing fancy, just a nice family meal. It's important to me to make as many memories with my little girl while she's little. I can feel the time slipping through my hands, and I know she'll be grown up before I even know it. It's a sad truth, but time really does go by quickly, and it seems that once you have a kid, the clock starts ticking a lot faster than it used to. I hate to think she won't be sweet and innocent like this forever, but I know it's true, and I know how precious every day is that I can spend with her. With as much work as I'm putting in right now, I cherish these days off with her even more than I would when time off is a little more abundant.

While she napped, I got to cracking on some work and then eventually passed out for my own nap. I'm still fighting the tail end of this cold, which has turned out to be one of the worst colds I've had in a while. It's almost gone, though. This evening I finished up the last module in the first section of Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy. This module covered subscriptions in GraphQL. Subscriptions are along the lines of how they sound; they allow you to watch for certain actions in your code and trigger a response when those things do happen. Given that our example code for this course is a blog, we have actions like creating posts, comments, or users, deleting or updating them. If a subscription is set up on, say, creating a post, every time a post is created, the subscription will return a response with the data being asked for. In a real blog app, this could mean that something could be tied to this subscription, so some kind of update to the user interface would change to reflect that post being created. It could be as simple as adding the post to the top of the lists of posts, or it could show up somewhere else, like in the collection of posts for that user. The possibilities are endless, but the main idea is that it opens up those possibilities.

I just got started working on the next section, and I won't be going very deep into it tonight. In fact, after writing this, I'm going to wrap up the current video I'm on and then probably call it a night. In this first module, we are introducing Prisma, a brand new technology to me. I don't think I've used Prisma in any other courses or projects, but I may be wrong. Prisma is an ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping tool that allows us to work between GraphQL and the database we've chosen for our project. I've used Mongoose before, which is an ORM that works with MongoDB, but it is specific to MongoDB and doesn't work with other databases. Conversely, Prisma is database agnostic and can work with several different databases as of now, with plans to add more. For this project, we are going to be using PostgresQL, which I've definitely never used before. I have no idea what to expect, but I think I'm in for some learning. I'm really excited to be learning some new tools and technologies, and I feel like I'm in good hands with Andrew. I think he will be able to teach these topics well and I should be able to walk away feeling pretty confident in my ability to work with them.

Until tomorrow!