Let me say, there is probably no such thing as a tiny error. The devil is in the details. And apparently the bane of my existence… Recently, two tiny, major errors caused me to waste time on items I should not have.

The first error involves modifying a tutorial. For project details, you can see it here. This tutorial involved using Python to sign into Twitter and Oauth, and subsequently doing a search as the user and returning the results to a webpage. The part I intended to modify was storing the user in the database, but I wanted to do it externally, as if it was a functional site. I headed over to AWS and spun up an RDS instance running Postgres, and created a database. I changed the database parameters in the app, and let ‘er rip! Except there was no ripping… I was able to connect to the instance using pgAdminIII, but could get no joy from my application.

After a couple of hours searching google and AWS,  I finally checked the logs on my RDS instance. It said the table did not exist… How was this possible?!?!? I created it myself, right over there in pgAdminIII, right where I have my other databases routed through! So I manually went and checked the database, and realized the table was set up on the wrong database. everything was executing correctly, but it was set up incorrectly.

The second error was a little less dramatic. I have been using Github Desktop to sync projects to my online account. (Because it is easier, and I am not a pro of the command line git commands.) Recently I switched computers and moved everything over. Upon doing so, of course I had to input my account information to access my data.

After a couple months of sporadic updates, I actually go to the website for some reason, and see that it looks like almost NOTHING has been committed. (The only thing showing is a new repo) I know this is not possible, I may not be a committing monster, but I have done more than that!!! So back to google I go.

The issue turned out to be a setting in the Github Desktop app. Even though you use your info to access the online account, there is another panel that requires you to input the account email address to receive proper credit. (shown below.) All appears to be working now. Debating on if it is worth to hunt down the old commits and see about updating the data to reflect on the chart…