Satisfied with the End Result

I've been working on a little personal project to beef up my portfolio for a couple weeks now, and I think I can put it to rest now. It's obviously not that big, considering it only took me a couple weeks to finish, but I like how it looks and I like how I did it. In this project, I used my framework of choice, React, with as strong of typing as I can muster with TypeScript. I relied heavily on the use of reducers with the useReducer hook, coupled with the Context API from React. I also have a couple of custom hooks I created, but they're mostly used to house functions, something you could do without the help of hooks pretty easily. I have found, though, that if I have multiple functions that are related, I like to wrap them up in a custom hook and keep the logic a little more tidy. Again, this is totally unnecessary, and some people may even argue that it's a bad practice. React is pretty unopinionated, though, so I'm allowed to come to my own conclusion.

For the styling, I finally got away from using component libraries in my own personal projects for the first time, and the freedom felt good. In every other project I've built, I've either used Semantic UI, Material UI, or even Bootstrap to build out the components. Up until my current job, I never really felt that confident in my CSS abilities, and probably rightfully so. Since I started my job, though, I've had plenty of practice writing CSS from scratch, and I've also supplemented that with a couple of long Udemy courses to really beef up my skills. If I had to rate my skills with CSS on a scale of 1 to 100, I would say I'm somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s. There's still a lot I need to improve upon, but I'm definitely proficient now. CSS is strange; you can learn the basics and be able to start writing CSS within a week and get by totally fine, but you can also study it for a lifetime and never reach mastery. I definitely want to be really good at it, considering my focus, for now at least, is on the frontend. It is obvious to me that I will be writing CSS in one form or another for my entire career, unless things drastically change, which they probably will. Nothing is constant in this field. CSS might not even exist in 20 years, or maybe robots will be writing it, I don't know.

Considering that I've reached the end of this project, this poses the question of what comes next. The way I see it, I have a few options. First of all, before anything else, I will need to get this project posted onto my portfolio, but that really won't take long. After I take a screenshot of the homepage and link the project into my array of projects, all that's left is to re-deploy my portfolio. The whole process will likely take a matter of about 15 minutes. Then, I need to consider what to do. I could start another project, of which I have a few ideas. I have my major project in mind, where I create a similar platform to Meetup but for developers to create teams and collaborate on projects together. This is still daunting to me, but it might be something I could start. I could start a smaller project, like a recipes app that has some search functionality and maybe even uses local storage to save recipes for a user. I could even expand on that and build out a little backend using MongoDB or Firebase to store users and that user's recipes. This could be interesting. I could also go back into the world of tutorials and finish up the MySQL course I started a while back. This is the least exciting option, but it would be good to expand my knowledge and learn a new skill like SQL. I haven't decided yet, but I will tonight.