The marathon begins...
I was able to get off of work at a reasonable hour today and came home to my little girl taking a 2 hour nap, a great window for me to get some work done. I was able to bang out the rest of section 23 of Colt Steele's "The Modern React Bootcamp" and deploy the end result. This section was all about using React Router in an actual project. We built an app that featured several dogs with links to more information about the dogs when clicked upon. The project also used Bootstrap, which I really enjoy working with. I reall enjoy working with any of the CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, Material UI, Semantic UI or the others.
As bad as I am at Web Design, it fascinates me and I would love to be better at it. These frameworks are great because they set you up with the components that you would need already styled. If done correctly, you can easily fit these pieces together to make something that looks great. Of course, they are all highly opinionated, which is why I think as you get better at design, typically people abandon these frameworks to allow for more creative freedom. I still believe that even the best designers have stolen ideas and concepts from these frameworks because they do certain things so well. For example, Bootstrap's hamburger menu would be pretty complex to create without Bootstrap, but people learn how to do it by looking at the code for this component and then adapting it to fit their needs. There are definitely concepts and ideas that could be derived from these frameworks, whether you believe in them or not.
Now, on to the final project of the class. This project spans 7 sections and is over 10 hours long. We will build a color palette creating app that is rife with features. It comes loaded with 6 preset color palettes and then you can add more palettes to this. You can drag and drop colors, scale the darkness of colors, and save palettes to local storage for future use. This will be a fully functional app, not one that's unique, but it will definitely be an excellent showcase of the skills gained throughout this course. I'm very excited to start working on this; I've been waiting to get through all of the other material to get going on this and the moment has finally arrived!
After this project, there are still some great sections left, dealing with hooks, context and webpacks, all very popular and I think very useful topics to get acquainted with. I'm already looking ahead to what's next in the pipeline. I will definitely be doing another React bootcamp next from another instructor. I've narrowed it down to three, one of which I have done some projects already under his tutelage on Youtube, and I was pretty impressed by his breadth of knowledge and his teaching style. The course itself focuses solely on one big project, which would definitely be a different style than what I have been doing, but could be a good change in pace. All 3 courses are right around 40 hours, so there is bound to be a plethora of information to consume, regardless of the one I choose. Until then, I'm going to keep the momentum going as long as I can!
Until tomorrow!
