An custom built API that utilizes MongoDB and Mongoose to manage basic back-end functionality for a very simple social media application. I built this as an excercise in familiarizing myself with MongoDb (and Mongoose), as well as building an application with the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern. Prior to this excercise, I was building API's by implementing all of the CRUD methods within the API calls themselves, but after working with Mongoose, I have found that putting all of that functionality in the controllers is much more intuitive since it leaves the API route files a lot cleaner, letting them do their thing. Learning this was initially a bit difficult, but after I understood how to modularize the seperate functionality it basically wrote itself. The big hang-ups I had were with designing how I should nest and associate the models and documents in the database. Specifically, I struggled with associating users with their "thoughts" (posts) and whether or not I should have reactions to thoughts also be associated with users. Once I realized that I could just push data into the various arrays whenever an API call is made, it all made sense.

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• Run npm install in the root directory of the repo to grab all of the required packages.
• Run npm util/seed-data to seed some data with some very minimal data and users.

I utilized Insomnia to test out the various API routes, but you can also use Postman. Make sure you seed the data first.