Today I worked to finish some of the website cleanups that I want to finish before going back to the product code.

The biggest thing I did was create some tooling to create the database indexes and schema from TypeScript code, instead of through the MongoDB Atlas GUI. I want this so that it can be in version control, and also so that I can trivially apply the schema to a fresh database when bringing it up. This was simple to do and now the database is looking good.

While working on this, though, I discovered a heinous bug in the next.js server actions handling, which is that if any middleware returns a HTTP error or throws or whatever, the result from the server action function call will be "undefined", instead of an error being thrown. This is really horrible because depending on how your server action works, "undefined" might look a lot like null meaning "there was not an error." The next.js folks don't seem super-motivated to fix this, so I just changed all my actions to return a positive "success" message which solves the issue (because undefined can't ever be mistaken for a positive success like it can for a null).