andrewdoak/thevegetalist

The Vegetalist. A MERN Stack Square Foot Garden planner.

Introduction

The Vegetalist is an app that is designed as a helper for planning and tracking a Square Foot Garden. In square foot gardening, a plot is laid out in a grid, and plants are paired and spaced in order to encourage efficient vegetable production, beauty, and companion planting (plants that are symbiotic, so to speak). This is a complex endeavor. I built this app to simplify my life, and hopefully others' who would like to take up square foot gardening, or already do it.

Technologies

• MERN Stack (MongoDB, Express, React, NodeJS)
• @vitejs/plugin-react uses Babel for Fast Refresh
• @vitejs/plugin-react-swc uses SWC for Fast Refresh

Getting Started

Links

• Trello
• Live App (Render)

Unsolved Problems

There is a list on my Trello Board. The one I would like to solve FIRST, is displaying the garden grid on the Current Plot Page. The second in line is having a Detail page that shows a larger vegetable detail, (similar to the Current plot page), and refactor the list on the Current Plot Page to contain less information: (e.g no image, just vegetable data, especially the to-be-implemented Harvest Date, and a link to the Detail/Edit Page.

Future Enhancements

Among the future enhancements I'm most excited to integrate, because it will be extremely practical and useful, is to add companion planting to the Vegetables model. Companion planting tells you what plants do well together/next to one another. It allows plants to thrive and repels pests. This was a stretch goal, but I know it's realistic.

Code Pride

It's hard to choose, but I'm gonna go with the back end. The controllers, specifically. I know this stumped so many people. And it probably would have me as well, but I turned to my trusty project week companion, LinkedIn Learning, specifically Emannuel Henry's course MERN Essential Training. I was able to adapt and refactor what he demonstrated, test in Postman, and had seamless CRUD on the back end before touching that on the front end. Super useful and also felt like good separation of concerns and Agile methodology.

I'm also pretty proud of the Settings page which contains User CRUD. This was a multi-day group effort in breakout rooms, and wasn't planned as first order functionality for me, but I'm very glad it happened the way it did.

Proud of my CSS, as well. I used modules. I look forward to learning Tailwind.

Code Learning Moments

Collaborative "teaching" and learning moments with Robert Davis on the Vegetables API functions, passing in the Data and Payload to those functions. Late night transformative coding growth for both of us. A thousand thanks, Robert. And so glad you ”get” as much as you “give.”