Category: Web Development

Fear of speaking and feelings of an inadequate technical knowledge base can often be a paralytic combination, especially to those newer to a technical field. Imposter syndrome and feelings of inaptitude can easily become dominant, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy with high levels of inertia. Thankfully, I have a low level of unease regarding speaking in front of people, including to groups upward of 60 people. While my presentation experience has largely not been about technical topics, much of the skillset translates over. As I mentally prepared myself for the idea of giving a technical talk, I still had to overcome the serious sense of imposter syndrome that I could provide anything meaningful to the conversation as a developer…

Last week I decided to install the React 16.8 alpha on a branch and experiment with React Hooks in preparation for their release on February 6, 2018. The site utilized a render prop based Slideshow component in several places as well as a handful of other class based components. Through this process, I was able to consolidate the application code and eliminate all class based components from the site's code base. The React team does not recommend refactoring your entire codebase to Hooks on their release. I did this primarily as a means to engage with the Hooks API in a relatively small codebase. You can find the code conversion to Hooks discussed in this post at the related PR. Converting to Hooks and lessons learned The Hooks…

2017 was the start of the journey from the directionless doldrums to an unbridled creative passion. I started the year looking for a job in a similar field as what I currently am employed in, believing that a change of scenery would help recover some of the drive and passion that has faded in my current position. Each day was a struggle to overcome the feelings of being beat down and unmotivated. My work ethic precludes me from outright giving up, but I was clinging on to the last few threads. Around the beginning of March, I had still not made much progress in finding motivation or a position I thought would be much better, and I started to rethink my career trajectory entirely. Did I want to continue working in this field? Did I like the…

I am so excited to announce that the redesign of my portfolio and blog is finally live after going back to to the conceptual drawing board and rebuilding it from the ground up. It has been an exciting journey to implement new development and design concepts that I have picked up since May 2017 when I built the first version of the site. At the time, it was the first full site that I had put together, and was substantially more involved than the relatively small projects I had done to that point. Since then I worked on more complex applications, built a full stack travel application with a team of two other developers, and dove headfirst into React. The previous version of the site was built using Jekyll as a static site generator. This was…

This past Tuesday evening, the team project that has enveloped all of my free time has launched. Wanderful is a random travel destination site built utilizing the MERN stack. Users are able to visit the site and click a button on the landing page to discover details about a randomized destination stored in our database. Here they can get a quick blurb about the location, and information about various points of interest including: hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and the ability to check flights to get to the location. If a user creates an account with the site they are able to save their favorite destinations and POIs where they can easily view them on their favorites dashboard. If a user desires to get any more information about a give…