Projects

You know those someday maybe projects, that sit in a doom pile in the mind while waiting to finally be discarded or surge in importance? One of my projects was finally consolidating two blogging platforms into one. I had previously built a portfolio site with Gatsby way back in the day—like 7 years ago when I mainly focused on front-end engineering. It had a bunch of technical and human skills posts that had largely been dormant since 2021. However, the posts about TypeScript utility types still drive a lot of traffic to this day. I started writing again last year and wanted something that I could get up and running without having to worry about managing dependencies and fiddling with all of the little things. That was a quick way for me to get stuck in the minutiae, and not actually write. The content was also less technical, so I decided to separate it and spin up a Substack account. ...

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge 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. ...

Building smaller projects helps to reinforce learning and be able to freely experiment with things. Larger projects require significantly more forethought on the app and data architecture, technologies used, and overall direction of the project. 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 POI, they can click on the given item to have the Yelp details for that location open in a new window. ...

On Saturday night, the 150th day since I started my coding journey on Free Code Camp, I completed the Simon Game project and claimed my front end development certificate. It’s been an amazing start to my journey as a developer, and I’m amazed at how much I have learned in such a relatively short period of time. The Simon Game project was definitely the most challenging of the advanced front end projects. Most of the HTML and CSS for the project I was able to create within a couple days. The circular divs comprising the colored buttons were relatively straightforward to create and position. Setting up an SVG circle inside the container housing the game buttons was also simple. I used the SVG to provide visual feedback if the player successfully completed a step in the game. I used React for this project as well and fully embraced the concept of components. The game board buttons, start button, and strictMode toggle are all their own components. Using components for this made sense as it keeps the logic more separate and avoids having a huge render method. ...

It is so easy to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem, that it seems like it works by magic and is unattainable. Another project is in the books. I completed the Tic Tac Toe game using the React framework with 5 days and around 12 hours of active development. By far the most complex part of this project was creating the computer AI component. The idea of it had me in analysis paralysis for a day or two. This project really emphasized the need to break down the problems into bite sized, even seemingly insignificant pieces. For a while, I struggled with even starting on the logic for the computer player. It is so easy to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem, that it seems like it works by magic and is unattainable. This is exactly what happened to me as I was struggling to assimilate concepts like minimax algorithms in search of the perfect implementation for the computer AI. ...