1 Next Auth I completed the backend part of t3 tutorial today. The author introduced Next Auth with Email Provider in a very well motivated way. The idea behind the Email Provider is that the website would send an email to the user’s email address; the email would contain a “magic link” with which the user can log in. The concept is intuitive, but to set it up and run it on a local machine is not easy: at the least, you’d need too set up some kind of service such as Mailgun or Resend.

1 Setting up Postgres To set up T3, I need Prisma. To go through Prisma quick start, I need Postgres. Postgres docs recommend downloading a binary for Macs. But this didn’t work for me: brew was much more straightforward. Once the installation is done, it is easy to follow the tutorial at the start of the official docs. 2 What is the name of the Postgres database that my Prisma client is accessing?

I picked this up in Fulda Staat library, and am very pleasantly surprised by the fluent exposition. I first came across finite automata over a decade ago when I read the New Turing Omnibus, back then recommended reading for the Cambridge computer science applicants. I got so interested at one point I considered switching subjects right away. But the presentation in the New Turing Omnibus is a bit out dated, and also left quite a lot of gaps to be worked out by the students.

Around 1.5 months ago, I took on two projects that uses Next.js and Supabase. I was initially very excited to have real projects to work on, with the guidance of seasoned professionals. But after working on each project for around 5-10 hours, I stalled. There just seemed to be so many nitty-gritty little things I had to learn in an unpleasant stop-and-start fashion. For example, Next.js clearly uses the directory structure to mirror different URL routes.

Just a few markers, before my memory is corrupted by new experiences. I started programming from scratch in August 2022. The very first steps were with Scratch (a tool mainly for children developed by MIT), and then C. The jump from Scratch to C was huge. C is a compiled language, and with the School 42 curriculum a lot of hard work was required to make even the simplest thing (e.