I’m trying to set realistic and achievable goals for myself. Definitely in the scope of the whole project, but more so on a day to day basis. One goal I’ve had is not to leave any day where the app works less than it did the day before. In other words, if I break it, it gets fixed before tomorrow.

Today was the day that I had declared SQLite Day. This would be the day I get SQLite working in the app. Much like attacking the Death Star, I knew this way an important mission. But perhaps like Luke Skywalker I also let myself believe it would be just like shooting womp rats in my T-16 back on Tatooine. I started by doing some basic tests, writing out some integers and displaying them back into the console. That worked.

I moved on to storing our top level object’s and getting those back out. BOOM! The app exploded. I pulled in outside assistance from Scott (and learned a thing or two about using the debugger). Among a couple of problems we picked out that I’d made a bad method call. That was fixed, but the app still was not working right. When I left it was about as function as an iRock. I left it for tomorrow.

It should have been so simple. It should have worked. Why didn’t it work? What did I do wrong? “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened!”, I thought. Maybe not quite that bad. But pretty bad! I decided to stick to my goal of not leaving the app broken at the end of a day. I loaded up my code. I then realized I needed to tweak my query, and retain an object that was getting released prematurely. And we’re all good. Moving on!