project_four

1. My project is called Gratitude Journal and it lets users log in and create entries about what they're grateful for. It's meant to help people practice gratitude in their lives and keep track of what they're grateful for, and have it all in one place. Gratitude has been shown to increase hapiness and decrease stress, and I think it's really important to pracitce it in real life, so hopefully this will help users acheive that!
2. I made this project because I wanted to help people practice gratitude because it has many benefits, as mentioned earlier, and so they can refer to it when they're having a bad day and feel better. I also made this project to learn node and express and how to use a database with it, because I wanted to learn how to build a backend application. I made it because I wanted to go one step furthur in my coding journey and build something more complex. It was built for the Athena level up challenge.
3. I made my project with Node, Express, better-sqlite3, css, and used ejs templates. I knew some basic sql, and I already knew css and html. It was the js part that I really wanted to learn, as well as how to connect it to a database and build a full application for users.
4. What I struggled with was definetly the js. I had to debug so many times because requests hanged or I didn't pass the right things to the ejs templates. I also had to delete my database and start again because somehow it had gotten undefined in the process. I learned about async vs sync functions, how to use cookies to store jwt tokens, and how to make routes and handle errors. Error handling was tricky since I had to think about what could cause errors and create more routes so that it didn't show a can't get request page or just the error. I learned how node and express works and how you can use it with a database and hash passwords. In the future, I want to use an async sql database, handle refreshing for tokens, and build it so that users can see each others posts and comment on them. However, I'm still very proud of what I built because I worked hard on it and learned so much.
5. Link: https://gratitude-journal-aepk.onrender.com/