I did it!

All my assignments are done and completed and out the door. Shipped. Ready to rock.

Not much else to say. It's a weird feeling. I've been going at this for a long time, and I have to say I am actually quite proud of myself. There was a lot of internal dialog, of why I didn't need the degree. I had the job, and family, and chores, and life. Why did I need the degree. The reason... to prove to myself that I could. To finish something I started and was left in the aether.

It's no longer hanging over my head as a, "If only I had..."

It is finished.

(Wow. 9 days from now I will have walked across the stage and 'graduated'.)

What an accomplishment for me. Started in 2018, dealt with family emergencies, degree changes, degrees re-changes, a global restructuring of virus protocol. All of the ups and downs culminates into one 10 second handshake and a wave as I cross the stage. 
(This is a simulation of me on graduation day)


I think I am glad I waited until I was older to finish my degree, I believe I got more out of it now then I would as a 18 - 21 year old punk kid. I have learned the value of time and was able to maximize efforts where I saw value and not so much where I didn't. I was wise enough to strive for the learning and education rather than a GPA. I was exposed to a lot of new things that interest me and a lot of other things that don't.

There was a specific task I think I was supposed to work on this week and I definitely didn't get to it because I don't even remember what it was. But I did create the new table in our DB for Appointments. I was going to also build out some more of our backend, but it looked like Sid stole the show again and did it. I think there can be some more functionality I might do, but really I think we have to build a video this coming week. And demo.

Also been having to do several onboarding tasks for starting the new job. I've been a busy little beaver.
(pictured below is a busy beaver. He has a house to run and family to provide for, but he also is studying computer science)

Whelp, I did it. I got the job.

I crammed for the interview and nailed it I guess. Luckily enough I believe they were looking more for a culture fit than raw technical aptitude. I applied for a job that I was wanting, more than what I had experience for. Heavy back-end work in the C# tech stack. They are also heavy on the microservices architecture which I don't really have any experience in, other than knowing the buzzwords.

As for the project, Sid and I are adding another feature about appointments. He changed some front-end code to make the appointments it's own component, and I am going to be adding a new table to our DB schema so that the appointments are just sample data that are stored locally on the front-end but are actually pulled from a DB.

Now that the interview process and stress are over I can get back to spending more time on the project. (Sorry Sid).

I'd like to send a shoutout to my wife and close friends who yelled at me and never let me quit school. So, I could finish and prove to myself that I can do it.

​

What are we even doing here in school, if it is isn't to get our wildest dream jobs?

This last week was kind of slow for me in terms of the project. I got with my teammate Sid and we discussed deployment of the app so we can have some testers give us feedback, which we did. Also I spent some time downloading and testing an app that another class had been working on and giving them feedback.

Also I have been looking into Docker to learn that so that I could possibly containerize our app and make deployment of the app and sharing the app easy.

But the most important thing I did this week was study and prepare myself for the interview of a lifetime. I have been mainly a front-end dev now for about 4(ish) years. I was lucky enough to begin my career at the height of the Covid years and was apart of so many layoffs it isn't funny. And because of that, every job lasted a few months, was in a different stack, and I always started at the bottom.

This job however, is a seemingly permanent job that is hard to get into, but a place where people can grow and work for many years and even, (dare I say it), retire.
So this week the momentum I had was for the end goal of attending school at all, and that is to get a job.

the image below is a representation of me hopefully signing the job offer.

Whelp I think last week I mentioned that I was working on getting password reset up and running. I got an MVP working this week and submitted just in time for our team's deployment of the app.

However, as soon as I did I realized that we make out app's, Authentication and Authorization system way harder than it needed to be. Supabase has it's own system in place that handles all of it. So now my mission is to figure out how to link our "Prompts" table with the Auth table from Supabase so we can set sessions and do proper password reset. It's not extremely important as we have our MVP working, but I want to figure it out and learn some more about that.

​

This is a picture of Mike Madano. He was probably the North Stars best player. He was so good He had a cameo in Mighty Ducks. I was told that pictures are nice, and I thought this one was good. because he eventually looked like this...

I don't have a lot of software to talk about, as this week was mainly wrapping up some small things and getting the app out the door, so we can have the demo sometime, soon. Possibly tomorrow.

Pretty uneventful week to be honest. I have been working on a few things. The biggest thing is making progress on our password reset functionality.

So this week I also got into the front-end side of things a bit. I have to build out a front-end component that is just a text input for user email address, and then a submit button. However while working on the front-end bit I realized we've greatly missed the mark on one aspect of design. Using a Component UI library for styling.

So I looked a few of those up and decided on using Gluestack UI. https://gluestack.io/

That way I don't have to rely on my terrible design skills, we can just use the components that a pre-styled for us. Also if we want to get crazy and try to do things like, think we know better than real designers, Tailwind is built in to the platform and we can add custom styling. Which honestly I am sure some of it will be required.

It will also cut down on dev time and we can focus on building rather than asking ChatGPT for the millionth time on how to center a div.

Don't you just love that feeling of spending a week trying to debug some code, and thinking you'll have to pivot because your idea isn't possible and there's some collision somewhere deep in some stack, only to realize you didn't pass the right set of parameters to the function, YOU created? Me neither.

Last week I had worked on getting some security built into our app, albeit a tiny amount, by hashing the passwords that are stored in our DB. As I mentioned in my last post, I had always heard about bCrypt, and was planning on using that, but I learned of the latest and greatest hashing algorithm built from Argon2.

I was pretty quick at registering new users and getting stored hashed passwords. But retrieving users was causing all sorts of problems. And it all started with this bit of code.

const argon2Options = {
type: argon2.argon2id,
timeCost: 3,
memoryCost: 19456, // ~19 MB
parallelism: 1,
hashLength: 32,
version: 0x13
};

This is the rules set to how you want Argon2 to hash the password. Size, time cost, etc... 

So, in the register user function you pass the userObject, AND argon2Options, But you also need to pass those same rules to the Fetch, or Verify function when logging in a user, and I conveniently forgot to do so.

So, what did I learn? That I am my own worst enemy

Whelp this has been a wild 2 weeks. And this password hashing and auth has me in ruins. I did a lot of research into which password hashing tool I wanted to use. Either bCrypt or Argon2. 

I chose Argon2, as it won best algorithm for 2024 or something crazy like that. I struggled a bit to get the hashing working properly and I thought Eureka! I had registered a user, looked in the DB and saw the hashed password. Just what I wanted...

That was until I tried to log in with that user and got non stop 401 errors. 

Apparently Supabase has it's own internal way of handling hashing and auth and it's fighting with Argon2. Now I am not sure what I want to do. Do I find a work around and force Supabase to cooperate, or do I start from scratch and do it the Supabase way? I think I know the answer, but I don't want it to be the answer. Will it work? Will I get something submitted by Monday? Tune in next week on... ​Hash Wars: Revenge of the Supabase