Derik Badman's Journal

Decided I was going to try to work on my various coding projects every day this month (since I love November daily projects), though have been finding it a little tough, as most of the things to do are large and involved or would involve starting up new projects. Did fix a few things with my Hadleyville online game project. But then I got really bogged down trying to get a backend cloud database with auth set up. Decided to try out Firebase, since it uses a nosql db and has what looks to be a pretty simple auth process (which easily integrates with Google whom most people have an account with). I just want to be able to save data to the cloud rather than just local storage, so it doesn't get lost so easily. Also figured it would be a good learning experience for applying to other projects (like my online character sheet).

Since Hadleyville was written in Angular (as a way to learn it some), I found an official Firebase Angular library, so far so good, the examples look simple enough. I update Angular, I install the library, I register for Firebase and get configs. I try to integrate the basic auth code into my app. Oops, there is some kind of typing issue (since Angular uses Typescript) so the app doesn't build. And... that's where I got stuck, and that's where I get so frustrated with using these frameworks. My end result is html, a bit of css, and some javascript. On top of that we have the Firebase api/library, then we have Angular, then we have the Angular Firebase library, then we have Typescript. I've multiple layers piled on top of the actual thing I want, and any of them could be on the wrong version to work with the other part or have a bug or have confusing/unclear documentation. It is completely frustrating, cause it is probably some little thing with Angular or Typescript or the Firebase library works (though I also suspect it could just be some kind of incompatible versioning of something), but I can't figure out what, because I don't know all these various layers well enough.

So that was a waste, and now I'm just going to try scaling back and writing directly with the Firebase library and see if I can get that to work, though really I'm at the point where I want to rewrite the whole thing so Angular isn't involved at all.

Watched a bunch of movies from the new crop of Criterion options. They put up the Virgin Suicides Criterion edition, so I rewatched the move and a bunch of the extras. I've watched it a handful of times (I have the normal DVD edition), and I always found some aspect of it mysterious or fascinating.

(...and then I never got back to finishing this...)