Category: Coding Patterns & Practices

Keeping it Lean: Building the Bare Essentials for Project Management

When you’re running a project that needs to stay lean — and I mean lean like taking a cargo bike to grab groceries instead of a 2+ ton automobile that’s slower, more cumbersome, and way overkill for the job — the tools you choose and the processes you define matter as much as the work itself. It’s easy to go overboard, drowning in Gantt charts, sprint boards, and daily standups that spiral into mini-retrospectives. But what if the goal is simplicity, agility, and clarity?

Let’s break it down.

1. Define Your Central Hub

The first thing you need is a single source of truth. This doesn’t mean a bloated Jira instance with workflows for every imaginable scenario. For a lean project, a simple Kanban-style board can do wonders. Tools like Trello or GitHub Projects (especially if you’re already using GitHub for version control) offer clean, intuitive interfaces that keep everything in one place.

Continue reading “Keeping it Lean: Building the Bare Essentials for Project Management” →

A Successful Deploy to Vercel + Adding More Auth & Login Features to The Web Interface (Plus an Error!)

In the last few posts I knocked out a slew of initial work. Much of it was just to get things up and running and make sure the database was live, the site was live, and that there was a good connection between the two. I did this by building the first basic login page with a dashboard that just shows that the user is logged in, along with a few pages to display general static content. That can be found in:

  1. Building “Adron’s Core Platform”: Starting a React App on Vercel
  2. Getting a Vercel PostgreSQL Database and Basic Authentication Operational
  3. The Confederacy of Errors Starting With Next Auth; Error, Error, npm ERR!

The tasks I’ll accomplish in the following post:

  1. I want a horizontal menu across the top that will link to the dashboard, login, and about page.
  2. I want an account creation page.
  3. I want to make sure that I set things up for the post-login action to be a redirect to the dashboard page.

Adding a Horizontal Menu

For this menu I’m going to add a div with links, assign it as a flex space (css), and add the pertinent links. The changed ./src/app/components/Navigation.tsx with changes looks like this now.

Continue reading “A Successful Deploy to Vercel + Adding More Auth & Login Features to The Web Interface (Plus an Error!)” →

The Confederacy of Errors Starting With Next Auth; Error, Error, npm ERR!

In the interim while I was getting to the next stage of this app, I ran into (what was I doing? 🤷🏼‍♂️) this error.

npm ERR! code ERESOLVE
npm ERR! ERESOLVE could not resolve
npm ERR!
npm ERR! While resolving: next-auth@4.24.10
npm ERR! Found: react@19.0.0-rc-66855b96-20241106
npm ERR! node_modules/react
npm ERR!   react@"19.0.0-rc-66855b96-20241106" from the root project
npm ERR!   peer react@"^18.2.0 || 19.0.0-rc-66855b96-20241106" from next@15.0.3
npm ERR!   node_modules/next
npm ERR!     next@"15.0.3" from the root project
npm ERR!     peer next@"^12.2.5 || ^13 || ^14 || ^15" from next-auth@4.24.10
npm ERR!     node_modules/next-auth
npm ERR!       next-auth@"^4.24.10" from the root project
npm ERR!   2 more (react-dom, styled-jsx)
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Could not resolve dependency:
npm ERR! peer react@"^17.0.2 || ^18" from next-auth@4.24.10
npm ERR! node_modules/next-auth
npm ERR!   next-auth@"^4.24.10" from the root project
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Conflicting peer dependency: react@18.3.1
npm ERR! node_modules/react
npm ERR!   peer react@"^17.0.2 || ^18" from next-auth@4.24.10
npm ERR!   node_modules/next-auth
npm ERR!     next-auth@"^4.24.10" from the root project
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Fix the upstream dependency conflict, or retry
npm ERR! this command with --force or --legacy-peer-deps
npm ERR! to accept an incorrect (and potentially broken) dependency resolution.

As with these dependency issue errors I was getting, which seems to be somewhat common with React these days (or maybe just most of web development!), I went about fixing it with the following steps.

First I removed the existing next-auth installation.

npm uninstall next-auth

Next I installed the beta version of next auth that supports Next.js 15 and React 19 (yes, I RTFMed (i.e. Read The Fucking Manual) a bit and read some other things to finally get to that conclusion).

Continue reading “The Confederacy of Errors Starting With Next Auth; Error, Error, npm ERR!” →

Getting a Vercel PostgreSQL Database and Basic Authentication Operational

Quick links to all posts in the series and related at end of this post.

In the last post I’ve detailed getting started with setup of a basic React App using Next.js and deploying it to Vercel using their respective command line tooling. That post is Building “Adron’s Core Platform”: Starting a React App on Vercel.

Database Time – Getting a PostgreSQL Database

First, I setup the database in Vercel. Navigate to Storage.

Next I clicked on “Create” next to the Neon option.

The next prompt form will appear. I went with PostgreSQL (Neon) database, as shown, then the closest region (mine is Portland).

Continue reading “Getting a Vercel PostgreSQL Database and Basic Authentication Operational” →

Building “Adron’s Core Platform”: Starting a React App on Vercel

Quick links to all posts in the series and related at end of this post.

There have been a number of changes in my Collector’s Tune Tracker endeavor since I wrote up the first posts for the effort with: Building a Multi-Tenant Music Collector’s Database, Starting a New Project – Let’s Choose the Tech, and Software Development: Getting Started by Getting Organized. This is a continuation of that effort. I’ll go into the differences in a later post about those first posts and how I got to this point here today. But for this post specifically, and the next few, I’ll be focusing on getting a project started with React and Vercel.

I’ll write these following an approach that is based in the following:

  • Suffice to say, I’m a bit rusty with my React.
  • I’m completely unfamiliar with Vercel. In these posts that’s about to change however.

There are also a few prerequisites. I’m working through this on an M1 Mac, using iTerm, and largely Visual Studio Code. That and a whole lot of documentation. The following are some other prerequisites that would help if you want to follow along with what I’m going to build.

Prerequisites

Rolling Into Things

Right off, let’s get the project started with the ole npx. The steps I went through involve the following – I just added comments inline to describe what I did or what setting options I went with for prompts.

Continue reading “Building “Adron’s Core Platform”: Starting a React App on Vercel” →