Tag: Projects

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…

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…

I completed my second project in React last Friday after about 12 hours of development in the course of 5 days. The Pomodoro timer is the second of the four advanced front end certification projects in Free Code Camp's program. I'm getting more excited as I near the end of this particular challenge. The live version of my Pomodoro timer can be found here and the code can be found on Github. I decided to build this project in React to help solidify my fledgling knowledge in the framework, and because I thought that the use of state and reusable components would be helpful in the project. Both turned out to be true. I feel like I have a much more sold grasp on React now, although I know there is much more to learn and complex things to build…

It has been an exciting couple of weeks since my last 100 Days of Code checkin. During that time I completed the last two projects in my front-end certification: a Tic Tac Toe game, and a Simon Game. I built both using the React framework, and feel quite comfortable with the framework after completing these projects. After completing my Simon game this past Saturday I was able to claim my front-end development certificate on the 150th day since I started my development journey and the 20th day of this challenge. It's fun looking back just two weeks ago where I thought I would get done before October 1st, and I finished a month before then. I still had it in my mind that the last two projects were going to be of a difficulty that I had never…