Time

I spent a lot of the day today either meeting with my cohort on the frontend or in our weekly meeting. Every week, on Wednesday, we have a meeting using GoToMeeting with our CEO, CTO, and some other executives, along with the rest of the IT department, to discuss the goings on. It's a round-table format, and everyone has a chance to talk about what they're working on at that time. There's usually a lot of information that isn't pertinent to me, but it's always interesting to hear about some of the other things going on in the department. It helps me to get a better idea of the bigger picture of the company and what they want to accomplish. Last week, I unveiled the progress I had made on my bank check step for the payments application, but there was still a lot of work to be done. I had it in a position where it was fully functional, but after that meeting I realized I still had a lot to do. But, since then, I was able to get all of those things done, and then some. We had a meeting on Monday to discuss what we needed on the backend, and were asked to implement a couple other features into the application. While I handled those on the frontend, my cohort created the APIs to interact with the backend to pull the information we needed. After he completed that, he went to work on changing some of the forms to utilize React-Hook-Forms, which is a really interesting and fairly new technology.

I haven't really had much of a chance to mess around with React-Hook-Forms yet, but apparently it's the future of form management in React. React started out with pretty archaic management of forms. Due to the restrictions in place with state management in React, dealing with forms can be a really tricky thing. Redux-Forms came along and simplified everything for a while, but there were some serious shortcomings. Mainly, Redux-Forms relied on many re-renders, and while it's certainly not slow on a small or medium-sized site, when you get to a larger sized application, 30 re-renders can be a real issue. Regardless, you want to do whatever you can to optimize the performance of your application. Realizing the shortcoming of Redux-Forms, Formik came along and solved a lot of the issues created by Redux-Forms. It was and still is a formidable option, and is certainly much better than Redux-Forms. But, there are still many re-renders and it relies on the render props pattern, which has been shunned by the community. React-Hook-Forms is the newest hotness in this area and solves almost all of the issues. It doesn't rely on any other packages and cuts re-renders down to just a handful. Over everything, it's very readable and at its base level relies on HTML validation, making it easy enough to understand for people not even familiar with React.

Overall, we are nearly finished with the check component of the payments application, along with the other features we had to add to supplement this system. In the meeting, one issue was brought up, to allow the representatives to proceed past the lead selection step if they are not working with a current lead. Given that the backend relies on the information coming back to have a lead ID, this could cause some problems. However, this is the way the executives would like it to be, so we can't really argue with that. For me, on the frontend, implementing this change will be an absolute breeze. We already have the component created; we'll just have to pass it the correct information and put it in the appropriate place. The change itself will take me maybe 15 minutes, tops. From there, a few things still need to be done on the submit object going to the backend, but even that is almost done. The goal is to get this rolled out by Friday afternoon for deployment on Monday, and while I won't have any issue exceeding that deadline, I know the rest of the team will take much longer to get it to that point. I expect this won't get rolled out until Wednesday at the earliest, but I don't see why it should take that long. From there, it sounds like they're really pushing for the implementation of another application that's currently being written in React Native, but will also have a web component. This will be my next task, for sure.

Until tomorrow!