Projects

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. ...

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. 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. I dove into lifecycles quite a bit more in this project: such as determining when the timer lengths were changed so the countdown component could update, and checking to see if one of the timers had completed so the next one could start. Being able to reuse the counter component for both the session and the break times was great. I really enjoyed only coding it once and adding one small line of code to set which state each one altered. ...

After much debugging and chasing of state errors for edge cases of operational order, I have finally concluded the development of my JavaScript calculator, which also happens to be my first React application. This particular project stretched me the most thus far for multiple reasons. Learning a new library was definitely complex and took some back and forth researching (more on that later). The primary challenges was handling all of the logic necessary to operate the calculator and then handling a bunch of unexpected cases and order of operations that would break the ideal scenario’s code. Due to the complexity of handling the various states1 in React and the need for each state to be populated in a certain manner for equations to not error out, I had to intentionally try to do operations incorrectly to make sure that the calculator would handle the incorrect or less than ideal operations patterns successfully. Solving one bug, created others in some cases and was a very valuable lesson in bug tracking and solving. ...

It has been an exciting two weeks in my web development journey. I’ve made a serious dent in the algorithm challenges since completing my Twitch viewer project. So far I have completed 18 challenges, leaving three advanced algorithm challenges between me and starting my advanced front end projects. These last few algorithms are kicking my butt though, as the difficulty between the intermediate and advanced challenges jumped up the parabolic curve. So far my strategy of stepping away from one challenge and moving to another when I get too frustrated has been paying off. Distance and time has led to some of my best breakthrough moments. Forcing it only pisses me off more, as well as weird looks when I mutter expletives at my computer on public transit. ...

It is always an exciting day to release a new project into the wild. After a week of active development, and a couple days doing minor tweaks, I’m happy to have my Twitch Viewer project live. This particular project was an interesting development in my skills with Javascript particularly. It was the first time that I dynamically created a Javascript object for a myriad of users based off of data polled from multiple API calls. After finally figuring out the constructor function the rest of the project built out quickly within a couple days. What was the most difficult challenge for me, was dealing with the asynchronous population of the object data, due to the API calls, and when to call the displayUsers function. ...