Week 001 — The Stack Goes Up

One day's work, one journal entry, and the beginning of everything.

Week of September 30, 2024

Progress

Found a LAMP stack Docker container that fit the bill and got it running. The first hurdle was a permissions issue on the MySQL init script — a chmod fixed it. Once that was out of the way, phpMyAdmin was accessible and I created the first database table: users, with the basic fields — ID, name, email, password.

Not much to show yet. But the dev environment existed. That counts.

The Hard Part

Even on day one, a question came up that felt bigger than it looked: how should passwords be stored? The answer — hash them with password_hash(), never store them plaintext — is well-documented. But digging into it led to the broader realization that even foundational decisions like the field type for a hashed password are worth thinking through. VARCHAR(255) is the right answer, and the reason matters: different hashing algorithms produce different output lengths, and password_hash() may change algorithms over time. A fixed-size field would eventually break.

Small detail, but it set a pattern early: understand the why, not just the what.

Next Week

The user table exists. Now build something worth having users for — the item model. Items are the core of srchParty. Without them, nothing else matters.