THE JOURNEY 4.0

Wow….I’m super excited, I made it to the end of month 4 at Tiidelab. My learning journey hasn’t been entirely smooth, there were times where I felt a bit overwhelmed by the courses and the amount of information I was digesting, but I pushed on. Because I believe success is about persistence and consistence, code it till you make it😁.

So, hello there! and welcome to the end of my month 4 at Tiidelab. as you rightly guessed, a lot has happened/been happening since my last article, and quite “Asynchronously “ too. First of, I started wearing the shoes for big boys and girls, I started REACT. and frankly speaking, now I feel more like a Frontend Developer. We learnt about react components, props and states, state drilling, context, etc. everything was moving so fast I had to catch my breath, I was lost, I wasn’t comprehending as much as I wanted. and then came the fear, how can I catch up to my mates? So, I began searching, for ways to learn more, materials to help me comprehend, and then I found it, Andrea to the rescue.. imagine my excitement when I discovered that Andrea had a video on react too. oh, and did he explain it well?, Yes, Yes he did.
For those of you that don’t know my good friend Andrea, I introduced him during my “JavaScript — single threaded and Asynchronous" Article.

According to Andrea, react is like having a mixer for mixing flour/bread. and then just dumping all the ingredients in the mixer (flour, sugar, milk, water etc), and letting the mixer do the work. This made a lot of sense, afterall react is composed of components (blocks of codes) that are written to be efficient and reusable.

my first react project was to build a “robofriends app". As we all know, you learn more by doing, at least that’s what I told myself. so I set out to build something, with limited knowledge of react, but determined to come out triumphant, and of cos with Andrea’s help, Okay that was just me being dramatic lol. keeping in mind the various components my app was going to have, I started building.
For the different robots, I used the "robohash API". Then I proceeded to make the various Components to be used in the App, for styling, I used a nice tool called “tachyons” (I had no idea what that was until this project). and boom!, I made my first react project. Please check it out here.

I also started implementing my Aphrodite sign up page with react, it was nice to put to work into my project all that I had learnt . For my sign up forms, I tested the waters with “Formik library". security is extremely important in software development, especially password security in input fields, for this I used the “Yup library" for input validation. “CSS modules" for styling, “react-icons” for the icons. React is a single page app, but provides a mechanism for routing between pages through the “react-router-dom" library, and I implemented this in my page.

Friday came as usual and we had our meet-up. In one of our Friday Meet-up,after an interesting lecture by our guest of honor from NECA, we had the opportunity to relax, by watching a movie.(“gone”, by Sam Dede, Gabriel Afolayan, and Stella Damasus)🍿. In another meet-up, the fellows represented countries by making presentations about the country’s culture, significant impact, economy growth over the years, weaknesses etc. I had the opportunity to represent the “great Poland", A country located in central Europe, known for its continental climate.

I’ve really learnt a lot, I must say. At first I thought react was something really hard, but now I’m starting to get comfortable. React routers, life cycle, semantic UI, CSS modules, etc. Are just a part of what I learnt.