Five weeks into the program, we’re completely done with the “sprinting” section of the course. It’s pretty amazing that in only five weeks, I’ve become comfortable with a ton of concepts and libraries that I had only heard of before and never really understood what they meant. It was definitely tough learning something new every two days, but it was worth the effort. To recap, some of the things we learned the first five weeks included: recursion, data structures, object inheritance, D3, Backbone, React, Angular, Node, Express, databases, and deployment strategies.
So what do we start with to kick off our second half of the course? MVP Project! By MVP, Makersquare is referring to Minimum Viable Product. It’s essentially a demo with bare bones functionality without bells, whistle, or tons of features. We’re pretty much given one full day to spit out a working full stack demo using the front/back end framework of our choice. It is mainly a lesson in scoping out your project into something that is doable in a short amount of time.
For my project, I decided to make a wallpaper search using the public Flickr API. However, due to the MVP nature of no time for filter features, it became more like a simple google image search. I chose to use React since I knew my upcoming group projects would most likely be in Angular, as the majority of the class prefers it. My objective is to stay neutral and well-rounded so I can prepared to take on a wider array of jobs when I’m done with the program. Here’s my finished product.
The program was quite simple, but the implementation was a bit harder than I thought. The React front end was to take a string, send it to my Node/Express server on the backend, which makes an API call to Flickr, processes and returns the results to the client. The main challenge was setting up React to work at all. Turns out getting Javascript to understand HTML syntax while also importing front end files like Node was a non-trivial task to accomplish. Eventually I figured it out, but not before I had actually made a fully working jQuery implementation in case I ran out of time.
The beautiful thing about React was once I got up and running, I was coding at a much quicker pace as everything was naturally modular and I could easily recycle some code from a previous React demo I created. Some components I made were almost cut and paste with variable names switched. Altogether, it was an interesting and fun project, testing my “full stack” capabilities in a time-sensitive environment. If you’re interested in seeing the source for a simple React project, feel free to take a look at https://github.com/rickyeh/MKS-MVP .
