One Last Project

I continued working on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy today, but didn't get too far, due to time constraints and a bug. Yesterday, I worked on hooking up all of the authentication for the app, including adding the ability to login and sign up. Today, I just put the finishing touches on this and added the ability to log back out of the app. All of this was facilitated by Firebase and went pretty smoothly, for a while. The first few times I used Firebase in other projects, we went a lot deeper with it and integrated into our apps in a much more involved way than we did in this one. That's not to say this app was simple, but the scope of it is far less than others I've built. In the end, it's a fairly straightforward e-commerce app. You can create an account, add, edit and delete products, take products and add them to your cart, and theoretically order those products. I don't think it would be too difficult to hook up the Stripe API to actually allow for fake transactions and go through that whole process, but as of now, there is no actual order screen. When an order is placed, that order is saved to a realtime database on Firebase and can be accessed from a screen on the app, but there's no way to actually go through putting in credit card information and placing an order in that way, or even faking a credit card order. I've done that in another app, and Stripe's documentation is so good, it makes this process very easy to implement. I may add that to this app in the future, but for now, I'm moving on to the final project.

I only had about 10 minutes left to complete for this app to be completely done, and I expected to get a good start on the final project tonight, but I hit a snag. As I was falling asleep last night, I think I must have made a mistake somewhere. When I was hooking up the sign out functionality, there was a part where we compared the current time to the time when we first logged in to authenticate the logging out process, and somewhere along the lines, I wrote something incorrectly. I scoured the code to find the issue, but couldn't find anything that looked out of place. After looking on my own for quite some time, I pulled up Max's code to see if I could spot anything out of place when comparing my code against his, but it all looked right to me. So, I decided I would take his code and paste it over top of mine, just to get past the issue. The caused me to get a whole new error. After throwing in some console logs and checking for errors again, I realized I had pasted in his API key for a fetch call in 2 places, like an idiot. This took me almost an hour to figure out, but I finally fixed the issue and got the app to run. I now have a fully working e-commerce React Native app, and it looks really cool. We used a lot of really interesting and difficult technologies to create this, and I'm getting a lot more comfortable with them, especially React-Navigation and Redux.

Last night, I talked about how I had a big phone call tonight with Will Sentance, the CEO of Codesmith and instructor for all of the Hard Parts courses on Frontend Masters. He was kind enough to spend about a half hour talking with me tonight, and I'm eternally grateful for the opportunity. I had a lot of questions, but I quickly realized I was only a passenger in this conversation. Will has been around the block and understands exactly where I am in my journey right now; he knew exactly the struggles I'm going through and answered my questions before I could even ask him. I talked about how I'm struggling to find a job and he gave me some really nice insight into the interview process. He pointed me in the right direction as to where and how I should be applying and will definitely save me a lot of time in the future. Next week, there is a Hard Parts Meetup on how to get hired, which he urged me to attend, and I'm definitely going to. In this session, they go into exactly how to handle these initial interviews; I think this could be very valuable. I also asked him about his own personal journey to get to where he is now. Without going into too much detail, his story is inspiring, but not extraordinary. He's not a child prodigy who went to school for Computer Science to get to where he is. He did go to Oxford, but for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. When he got out, he went through a bootcamp based out of San Francisco, where he realized the true advantage to getting great jobs is the technical communication aspect of coding, which is the centerpiece of his courses. I learned a lot, but I hope I get to speak to him again, because I have so many more questions for him.

Until tomorrow!