Unauthorized access

Today was all about creating an administrator login to my React.js soundstock.io project. This page will show me any messages left to the developer as well as a visitor counter. Seems simple enough right? I could have taken a few different paths. The more elegant method would be to update the models to allow for an "admin" option in addition to the existing artist and investor options. However, since I'm the only one developing the site I decided to use local storage and state to determine if admin criteria has been met.

My If statement check for a match in local, all that's left to do is query the database and render the page. Using "this.state.message.map()" I'm able to iterate over the array built from the loadMessages() function to render the desired content.

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Why Do I Code?

I've been a paid technology professional for half a decade and this is not my first career. Why do I bother to learn new tech and torture myself with daunting task after daunting task? Well, the brain exercise is great and so is the ultimate sweet satisfaction of writing and deploying a thing that works. I love the alchemy of it all, to forge interactive material FROM NOTHING that can change how we behave is the closest thing to magic we have... other than real magic of course. The overwhelming truth here, is that I code to bring my ideas to life. I wanted to be able to communicate my "million dollar ideas" effectively and drive innovation. Here's an idea, what if we could harness the power of traffic, like wind or water? There may not be a pure software solution for that, but I feel like I need to put that one out there. The idea that motivated me to get into tech, though, is about connecting crowdfunding and publishing/royalty distribution. I called it SoundStock, n...

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I Used ChatGPT At Work Today

AI has been fun, interesting, a little bit scary and today, useful. I was having trouble constructing the perfect regex involving a variable number of commas. After spinning my wheels for about 15 minutes and spending another 10 sifting though stack overflow posts, I thought to give ChatGPT a try. It worked like a charm, complete with examples and a detailed explanation. The possibilities are endless. Does this mean we can (or will soon be able to) create anything we can think of? These are exciting times. Here's how I plan to dive in (courtesy of ChatGPT): Understand the basics: Start by familiarizing yourself with the basics of AI, including what it is, how it works, and its applications in various industries. Learn programming: AI is based on programming, so it's essential to learn programming languages like Python, R, Java, or C++. It's also crucial to understand data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles. Explore machine learning: Machine learnin...

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