[6:55 pm: There's nothing like sitting by the pond with a stack of books.]

Just finished the Crash Course.

They suggest moving on to one of the interactive lessons like Building a Recipe Sharing App to cement the knowledge, but let's see if I can start building The Pathwooded Word Count Tracker now.

Aha: I'll start building my product by adapting the way they structure the recipe sharing app, taking just the parts I need and ignoring the rest.

The ideal sequence seems to be:

1. Set up the data types.
2. Create the design / UI.
3. Connect the data and UI via workflows.

I'll start by adding a Name field to the User data type so I can display it in their account.

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In the lesson Building a Recipe Sharing App, they also create About and Profile Photo fields. But that's unnecessary in my app because I'm not building a social network (am I? Not now, anyway.. that would be an interesting feature later on).

I need a data type to store users' entries, i.e. the words we count and track. What should I call it?

"Words" would be an obvious name for this data type. Not very descriptive, though. I'd like to make it so if a teammate wants to help develop The Pathwooded Word Count Tracker, they can quickly get an idea what's stored in the database.

How about "Daily Entry"? That conveys that the user is supposed to write something each day, and I track and store each day's word count independently. The user will then be able to retrieve a previous day's entry by itself.

If I wanted to implement a feature that lets the user retrieve multiple days of entries in one go, maybe display what they wrote last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in one text box, then it's just a matter of selecting those individual days from the DB and returning them. That's thinking ahead, though.

Using "Entry" also hints at a sort of diary-like activity. It's time for your daily diary entry!

Thinking of it as a diary may promote a writing habit. Even if you don't have a particular topic in mind for the day, just write about what's been going on in your life. Or whatever thoughts are passing through your head. Or the nearest brick.

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