05/03/2021 Livestream notes

1 minute read

Mantra

(a small idea to guide the day’s work)

Everything takes longer than you think it will.

(what do I plan to do)

Now that we can get the relevant, plain text content of our emails without all the crazy RFC5322 stuff:

Save the email to the DB
- First real-world foray into Datomic 😳
- Still need to figure out DB schema
If we get that far, start building the frontend

(plan != reality)

After some trials and tribulations, I finally figured out why my JSON was not showing up as JSON in the body of my POST requests: I needed a header in the request that specified that the request contains JSON 🙄
HOWEVER, we did complete the circle of sending an email, parsing it, and saving it in the backend! Huge step 👍
We also refactored from Reitit to Compojure: more docs, more examples, easier to work with altogether. And perhaps most significantly: I have a better feel for how to work with it than Reitit.
We made our first complex-ish Datomic write function: it saves one or many new entities in a DB, grabs their entity ids, and associates them with an existing user’s “saved-items” attribute. Pretty complicated stuff, but I’ll get more comfortable with it as I go along, and the query power of Datalog/the data model of Datomic will hopefully make up for the fact that writing to the DB can be a little bit complicated.

Start in on the frontend for the app: now that we can save content from our emails, we should work on viewing it next.

(things referenced mid-stream)