React Native + Expo Go Week 9

Robotics meeting for my school (FIRST, specifically FRC) are starting meeting again, and because I’m a junior who has a lot of experience within our team, I’ll be posting even less, but I’ll do my best to keep up with this, if time allows.

August 13th, 2025

Almost done creating a habit according to the tutorial’s directions, but TypeScript doesn’t seem to be recognizing the new database IDs I’m using for it to connect with AppWrite:

const handleSubmit = async () => {
    if (!user) return;

    try {
      await databases.createDocument(
        DATABASE_ID, 
        HABITS_COLLECTION_ID, 
        ID.unique(),

When I double checked my .env.local and my appwrite.ts files, the names were the same, so I didn’t know what the error was. Turns out, it’s actually a safety-feature-like thing because when a I used process.env. to assign the value to DATABASE_ID, this is how process.env actually works:

interface ProcessEnv {
  [key: string]: string | undefined;
}

Meaning that DATABASE_ID could be assigned the value undefined. So, I had to use an ! (exclamation mark) at the end of the ID name, i.e. process.env.EXPO_PUBLIC_DATABASE_ID!;, to tell TypeScript that this object does indeed exist.

August 16th, 2025

Today, I updated the permissions for registered users of the app to edit habits. In a habit planning app, users should be able to create, edit, update, and delete their tasks and habits as they do please, right? So, in AppWrite, to make the users able to do those four functions to their habits, I went to a collection’s page (in this case habits) and went to the “settings” tab of that collection. There, I went to the “permissions” section and added a “new role”, in which I selected the “all guests” (because I was editing the access that all guests have to habit instances), and checked off all four functions so that users can do so to habits.

Here’s a review of all the organization of the database provider (AppWrite) I’m using for this project:

Project (i.e., AP Stat App) → Database (e.g., habits_db) → Collection (e.g., habits) → Documents (e.g., Take a shower)

Collections function like classes in OOP programming.

Later, however, I ran into an error with the created_at attribute being undefined,

The error? It was as simple as missing the parentheses at the end of this line:

// Incorrect
created_at: new Date().toISOString
// Correct
created_at: new Date().toISOString()

Well, I guess that really emphasizes the need to pay attention to errors in plain sight! (this was a really really simple error)

Resources:

Special Thanks:

To ChatGPT-5, who is still debugging my code (I mean who isn’t using it to debug their code?)