Week 014 — New User Flow Complete, Lost Item Begins

A month away from the project. The subscribe flow that was almost done in December finally shipped, and then the real work started.

Week of January 27, 2025

Progress

The new user story closed on Monday: subscribe button, sign-in redirect with session-tracked return URL, and a success page that confirms the subscription and sets expectations about what comes next. The full loop — arrive, understand what the product is, sign up, get started — now works end to end.

The same day, a new feature story opened: what happens when a user loses something. This is the core product action, the thing every other part of srchParty exists to support. The work started immediately.

By end of week, the schema had a new lost_items table to track lost instances (when, where, reward, finder, owner), the items table gained is_lost and lost_id columns, and the item page had the first version of lost-state UI — a "Lost it" button, reward field, and visual badges indicating an item's lost status on the items list.

The Hard Part

JavaScript event handler syntax bit hard this week. A button's onclick wasn't firing, and the reason took too long to find: the handler was being assigned as button.onclick = myFunction() — with parentheses — which calls the function immediately and assigns whatever it returns (nothing useful) to the event, rather than assigning the function itself. The correct form is button.onclick = myFunction. No parentheses.

This makes complete sense once you see it. In the moment, staring at code that looks right and isn't, it takes longer than it should.

Learnings

Assign functions to event handlers without calling them. element.onclick = handler is the assignment. element.onclick = handler() is the mistake.

Next Week

The lost item feature is mostly rendering correctly; the reward amount still needs to save properly and show the right formatting. Purge logic needs updating to clean up associated lost records when an item is deleted.