Cruising through this course

I'm writing this today a little after 8pm and, since I had the day off today, I was able to already accomplish a ton. I completed 3 very complex sections of Neil Cummings' "Build an app with React, Redux, and Firestore from scratch" and will likely knock at least 2 more down by the end of the night. I don't have to work the next 2 days as well, so I have no excuses tonight; I need to stay up until at least 12 and knock some serious work out. I've done really well with this course so far, but I have this nagging error in my app that I can't seem to get to the root of, and it's driving me nuts. Every hour or so, I look at it again to try and find the solution, but to no avail. It's likely that this error will take care of itself by the end of the course in the refactors, but it still bothers me that I can't pinpoint where it's coming from. It's not a crippling error, either; it just happens sometimes when you click on the create event button and it's an easy work-around while I'm working on the app.

I'm still deep in the trenches with Redux, which is great because I can use as much practice with this crazy tool as I can. After setting up several boilerplates in different components, it's definitely making more and more sense, but I'm still a long way off from being able to create it in the wild. Forms are tricky in React in that you have to create a separate function and link it into the buttons, but there are even more layers of abstraction when you decide to bring Redux into the equation. The good news is, in one of the sections today, we created reusable components that could be easily used in other projects, including a text field, text area and dropdown. The end result is fantastic and, like I said, is transferrable to other projects, so I won't have to worry about creating these from scratch anymore.

Then, we moved on to adding Google Maps into our app. I love working with maps; for whatever reason, it's fascinating to me to be able to conjure up this map into your app. However, since the creation of this course, Google has decided that they don't make enough money, so you have to set up a paid account to access the API's. This is garbage to me and just not something you should be doing in the web development space unless you want people to run away from your products. There are some great competitors out there that are completely open-source, like LeafletJS and OpenStreetMaps, but I guess when you're Google you can do whatever you want. If it was up to me, I would have loved to have worked with Leaflet again. The project I did with Leaflet, as simple as it is, is still one of my favorite projects that I've done. They have awesome overlays to their maps to give it some awesome styling, but alas, I'll have to settle. At least Google gives you $300 in credit to mess around with the products, so I shouldn't ever have to pay for anything. In other words, I'm complaining for no reason.

Until tomorrow!