Holy smokes, Bat-viewers! Today’s adventure took me down a rabbit-hole and then up out of an ant-hole.

So our focus this week has been on databases. Coolness - the stacks are really starting to feel complete. Today was our second (and final) day with Mongo. Our task for the day was to complete a functional backend and then modularize it. I struggled with some of the syntax to get the backend up and running, but lunch and asking the right people the right questions helped and I was finally up and running. Then I started to modularize my code. I kept getting informative error after informative error. I went through about a dozen silly little things in about five minutes. And then — brick wall! After staring helplessly at the error, not really understanding how I could get such an error, I sought our instructor’s assistance. Unfortunately, it was right at the end of class and he had to leave. So I was stuck with it.

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Once I had identified and dealt with the definition versus loading problem, I had a short but productive streak, only to come to a complete halt because of another cryptic problem. While the definition versus loading problem is an obvious mistake (albeit easy to make, easy to overlook, and hard to diagnose), my next cryptic problem was not one that I, or the senior programmers that were kindly helping me, even knew to look for.

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Angular uses a very similar statement to define a new module and to load an existing module. For example, the initial definition for my stage-hand app was:

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var shApp = angular.module('shApp', []);

While the statement to load my stage-hand module (e.g., at the beginning of the controller and service files) was:

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var shApp = angular.module('shApp')

Note that the only differences are , [] and ;, so it’s easy to make a mistake.

To make matters worse, the symptoms were really cryptic.

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