I'm a little confused about what you're trying to achieve with that query. The first object passed to .find specifies some search criteria, so you're fetching all users except the one with _id === userid. The second object specifies which fields to include in the output, equivalent to a $project stage. You're creating a new field "friendsList", and pass in an expression {$ne:userid}. First thing is, you'd have to pass an array to $ne, specifying which values to compare, something like: { $ne: [ '$friendsList._id', userid ] } However, I'm not sure if that'll do what you expect, because that will return documents with a "friendsList" field and a Boolean as value. Generally, I don't think it's possible to filter with $project. Assuming that you do want to filter, put it into the first object. Maybe you're looking for something like this? User.find( { _id: { $ne: userid }, friendsList: { $ne: userid } } ) That would return a list of users where _id !== userid (-> all users except one) userid is not present in the friendsList So basically a list of people who aren't friends with Mr. Userid. Hope that answered your question.

I'd love to help you with this, but I'm really the wrong person to ask, two months ago I couldn't even set up a server...

Good to know, I have yet to explore how to write more advanced queries. That'll definitely be one of the next articles.

Honey I'm still learning this like you, but I'll give it a shot 🤟 Since you have the array of friend IDs, I'd try the $or operator: const list = YourModel.find({ $or: [ { friendId_1 }, { friendId_2 }, ... ] }) Hope that works... (you're using mongoose, right?)

I could think of a gazillion reasons, so this is difficult to answer - but my strategy is usually to first narrow it down (request to API is working? database connected? etc..). Good luck with finding the bug 🐞

Great to hear you find it helpful. You're not too late to the party, 100 days is a lot... I hope that from Day 50 onwards, I can replace the research and documentation with short tutorials for some mini-projects, but I'll see how it goes.

Hi there, I learned React mostly with these two Scrimba courses (first one is free): Learn React for Free The React Bootcamp After that, I could build my own small projects and just kept coding to practice. This playlist looks interesting too, it's on one of my favourite YT channels and very very recent: Full Modern React Tutorial

Apart from The Net Ninja and Traversy Media , I can't really cite any resources that I'd use regularly. Specifically for the MERN stack though, I can recommend the Full Stack Course from Helsinki University. But the learning curve is steep to say the least, I often get stuck and have to do additional research. I've also bought the most recent Udemy MERN course from Brad Traversy, but realised I couldn't keep up with the pace - which was the initial motivation for this blog. I think I'm almost ready now to go back to it, though. And I'd love to read about how others tackle this challenge!

Thank you! When I started out, 100 days seemed not enough to learn the whole MERN stack, but it's going surprisingly smooth. My resources-of-choice whenever I want to learn something completely new are these two YT channels, they have almost everything covered: The Net Ninja Traversy Media Other than that, I mostly use the official documentations, or just throw a specific problem into my search engine.

Awesome, I love how writing about the things you learn slows down the learning process - in the best way, so you don't proceed before having a good grasp at what you've picked up.