This week's focus has been object-relational databases and using one to build a CRUDdy bookmark manager — *shock horror, audience faints*. Just to be clear, CRUD stands for Create Read Update Delete, and is not a pet name for my fury at databases. In fact, I've really enjoyed experimenting with them. I have dabbled in some MongoDB in the past but since join tables don't seem to be a thing, I found myself iterating over large collections of data quite often. This doesn't seem to be much of an issue with Postgres. I learnt so much about SQL statements and I'm pretty confident in my ability to manipulate databases from the command line.

The weekend challenge was pretty much a re-hash of the bookmark manager, but I pushed myself to complete as much as I could without checking the walkthrough. Here's the final product — a not-as-good clone of Twitter!

Despite a few attempts to break the app by embedding HTML in the comments, I think it still looks and works pretty well. In typical Van-style, I made it 92% more goofy by seeding the database with infamous Jaden Smith/Ed Balls Twitter quotes.

My code was collaboratively reviewed on a big screen by the rest of the cohort. I've always worried about sharing my code because I feel like there's this weird pressure for me to write "good code" because I "have experience". I wouldn't be here if I thought I could write exceptional code! I hate doing anything in front of big groups of people too, so I was understandably nervous (palms sweaty, mom's spaghetti). I actually got some really helpful feedback and suggestions that I would never have otherwise considered, so in the nicest way possible, I urge anyone who is hesitant to show their code to get over themselves and just do it. To get the most out of this course, you really need to get out of your comfort zone!