Putting the Color Project to Bed

After many, many hours and almost 5 solid days of working on this Massive Color Project for Colt Steele's "The Modern React Bootcamp," it's finally finished, and it looks good! There are some really cool features on there, and actually I will definitely be using this app in the future for building color schemes in my projects. I learned a lot along the way, and it really goes to show the difference of actually doing something instead of just listening to lectures. Without being able to actually implement the ideas being taught, there is no way to solidify the knowledge. It would never make sense on its own without context. Also, there are multiple packages that this project relies on, most of which would be used on a daily basis in a professional React developer's life. I also learned a lot about how to use Material UI, which will be incredibly useful going forward if I start to try to build my own projects. Material UI will make it much simpler to create beautiful components without having to worry about all of that. Which leads me to an interesting question: could I actually build something on my own without the help of a tutorial, at this point in my education?

I think the short answer is no. I don't feel like I fully grasp the big picture of all of the moving parts going into React, and even web development in general. Don't get me wrong; I've learned an incredible amount in the matter of 2 and a half months. I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. I think I'm very close to being able to put all of those pieces together in my head to be able to map an app out, but at this point I'm having a difficult time even knowing where to begin. I don't think this should be discouraging, though. This will be a long process, but I'm shortening that process significantly by working as hard as I am. When I complete this bootcamp, I will move on to another React course, and hopefully by the time I finish that, I may feel comfortable enough to create my own apps, but then again, I may need to do another one after that. Regardless, I think I've been as efficient as I possibly could be in my learning process and I've wasted very little time going down useless rabbit holes. These small victories of completing projects and being able to look back on them after deployment really help to give me the motivation to keep going.

After I completed the project, I got to work on the final few sections of this nearly 39-hour bootcamp. I'm learning all about hooks in React now, which definitely add another layer of complexity to React, but will eventually simplify everything once I figure it out. I finished section 32, which was a basic introduction to hooks, and I have about 18 more minutes left in section 33, which is actually another project. This project is another simple todo list, but with hooks. The app uses local storage to allow the user to save the data, which I love. I don't think using local storage is a preferred way to save data in the web development world, but I just think it's a really cool concept to just save this information directly to the user's browser. For whatever reason, that's an exciting idea to me. After this project, it's on to the context API, NextJS and then we wrap it up with a webpack mini-course bonus section at the end. Only 6 more sections to go after this project, so it's really time to start looking for the next course! I spent some time today looking at the available courses, and I think the React course by Maximillian Schwarzmuller will be the one I go with. I followed a tutorial of his to create this blog, and I thought he did a great job at teaching it. There are 3 other courses that I might consider, still, so I'm not ruling anything out. I still have another week before I'm done with this course unless I really get some stuff accomplished in the next few days. I'm looking forward to checking this course off the list and adding a new challenge, though!

Until tomorrow!