Cruising Through

I was able to take advantage of a couple of decent nap-times for my little girl and get some work done on my day off today. It's not even 9pm yet and I've already finished 4 sections of Neil Cummings' "Build an app with React, Redux, and Firestore from scratch," covering a lot of ground. We have set up the routing for the app along with all of the components, and it looks pretty good. We are using Semantic UI for the styling, so there's very little CSS involved; it's all derived from the Semantic UI library. I've used Semantic UI in several projects in the past and love it. I think it looks a lot better than Bootstrap and is much more "semantic," for lack of a better term. The only other UI framework I like as much for React is Material UI, but I'm very pleased to be using Semantic for this project. While I do love CSS, this project should focus on the technologies associated with React, and spending needless time writing CSS would be a waste. There's a course I would like to take on Sass after I finish up with React courses, but until then, I'll have to remain somewhat of a novice in the CSS world.

I'm still formulating my idea to morph this project into a site for people to match up and create local coding groups. The more time I have to think about it, the more I like it. I think it will be pretty difficult to implement it in the way that I'd like it to be implemented, but I think I can figure it out. This course will give me a great framework for the project, from which I should be able to adapt it into something unique. Also, this will look a lot better in the portfolio than just simply coding along to create a project. Even better, if I could actually get to the point where it was useable, that would be incredibly useful. That would be a real stretch, though. It would also involve going down paths that I don't necessarily want to, such as marketing the app and creating an actual business. I'm not looking to become a freelance developer or create my own business; my end goal would be to work for one of the leading development teams, like Facebook's React team or the like. This is a long way off, but one can dream. Running a business is a whole different realm, one that, as an economics major, I delved into a long time ago and really don't have any interest in anymore. Who knows where my path will take me, so I won't take it off the table; it's just not something I'm actively pursuing.

Today, the topics of learning were forms in React, building a CRUD app, and routing. Forms are a little complicated with React, as it doesn't come with that built-in like a framework would. Once you get the hang of the pattern associated with building a form, it's really pretty straightforward and definitely repeatable. The same goes for building a CRUD app; it's all just a pattern that you have to repeat for different components and directives. Same with routing, for that matter. I think using React-Router is really straightforward and easy to work with. This is the 3rd course I've taken on React, so I've covered these topics in depth now, from 3 different teachers, and I can tell you that they become so much easier with repetition. The first time I saw these patterns, I couldn't wrap my head around it. Now, I'm able to predict what the instructor is going to do next a good amount of the time. I'm getting closer and closer to taking those training wheels off and building projects on my own.

Until tomorrow!