React-ing Badly

Amy R.
Amy R.
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

The weekend has been long and not that full of progress.

I tried most of the afternoon to get some React basics tied down and was nodding off watching the course videos. When it got dark and I probably should have just went to bed I went to the store, because that’s the only thing to do around here. Bought my diet-obliterating treat, a chocolate brioche, which I had resisted as over the top for months but it’s nice (it’s kind of like a babka, but it’s Walmart) and listened to a podcast that had been left unfinished because I had to turn it off to concentrate.

Then I watched a couple of short videos and came home, deciding it was time to load up the starter app React gives you and mess with it until I can remember how things work. It’s like music lessons. You repeat the etude until you don’t think about the mechanical part of it anymore.

I’ve gotten a little bit better. After flailing because I forgot how to set up a component file and get it added properly, I finally got some static content to render. Then I found a couple of videos on passing data around and took a bunch of notes on a 15 minute video, but the props thing and where and how to pull the data became less hazy.

I also used the Markdown extension someone in the Slack chat suggested to me and made my notes less of a hot mess. I have six or seven JS and plain text files that are very disorganized, but this one looks orderly. I’ll need to break them up and extract what I can from them. So a baby step was made.

Early this morning because I’m a vampire I left some notes on someone’s Memory Game. They said thanks. A deed done. I haven’t been able to do much of that lately because I’ve been finding my own way out of the dark lately, but I pulled myself away for the sake of variety and maybe to convince myself that I’m not completely terrible at this.

It also made me think “Damn, I have to rewrite all that bloody code when this is over.”

Amy R.

Written by

Amy R.

Amy lives in western North Carolina where she studies web development and daydreams about moving somewhere not so humid.