Let’s Build a Web App! Lo-fi Edition / Week 4 out of 30

Hi all,

This is my weekly update on my quest to make 2 web apps in 7 months (6 months remaining!): short edition this week since I’m actually on a family vacation in the Caribbean. I trust you know what’s up, but see my previous posts if you’re interested in previous updates.

1. What I aimed to get done — This was actually the last week(!) I allocated to my first web app, kusamochi.me (a purely gratuitous personal art site with image galleries, review posts, art posts, and general posts). The previous week I barely broke ground on the React frontend. That meant that this week I’d have to develop the rest of my React frontend, create the custom Wordpress types for each type of content, dynamically render each category of content, and deploy to my Docker swarm to meet my goal of finishing this week.
2. What I actually got done — I implemented about half of the site nav logic with Redux, did a bit of styling with Aphrodite, sought out and received some feedback from mentors, and read up a bit on best practices for React and Javascript.
3. What went well / what was difficult / one thing I might do differently next time
   What went well: I managed to implement several new libraries for the first time and get them working as intended (doing something for the first time always feels like a win). Learning to style with Aphrodite went especially quick because the pattern was similar to my past strategy for styling React components (a Javascript object to specify inline styles for each component), so I saw some of my past experimentation with React paying off.
   What was difficult: realizing that the documentation for one of the libraries I was trying to implement had not been updated since a feature was removed a month or two ago; also having to balance between learning the best practices for React development and moving quickly.
   What I might do differently next time: not sure! If I had more time, it would be good to start off a project reading through a guide to developing in ____ to reduce the amount of things to clear up as I go through a project.
4. One cool thing I learned about — The distinction between ES6 and Javascript, and some new ES6 features (const vs var vs let, object destructuring, object literal enhancement, and the spread operator).

Conclusion:

I’m quite a bit behind where I wanted to be at this point, so I have to do a bit of adapting and try to come back to kusamochi.me every once in a while, while I work on my next project. But I think it was definitely a good way to get my gears started with developing a web app end to end, in preparation for the manga publishing and sharing platform. On the other hand, I would’ve loved to get a few more things under my belt before moving on. Next I hope to spend a bit of time outlining things for the second project.