Weeks 35 -> 37 in/out of the office (24/10/2022 -> 11/11/2022)

Weeks 35 -> 37 in/out of the office (24/10/2022 -> 11/11/2022)

The last few weeks have been busy handing over sections of an outstanding project before travelling to Hong Kong for a much-needed holiday. This image was taken around dusk halfway up the trail of Lions Rock Peak in Kowloon. Word of caution, take the minibus or taxi uphill to the start of the trail from the road because the hike is very steep and you will be rambling and climbing for a lot of it! It was also great to see family and friends after a long time, as the Covid restrictions have eased off significantly since the height of the pandemic.

I brought along my laptop to finish off a pet project: learning basic syntax with create-react-app, with the following aims:

  • Getting to grips with folder structure regarding the components directory and pulling data from the script itself, a JSON file, or a third-party source.

  • I learned about using React's UI library to place standard features I didn't want to spend time deliberating on myself. For example, a tabs feature can be quickly implemented without knowing what's happening under the hood.

  • Learning the syntax and thought process for introducing props and state management, which I still find difficult- I don't have that light bulb moment when you realise something that is done declaratively in vanilla JS, you should be using React props or state to control how data is passed between components.

  • Use of more reusable and less granular CSS as opposed to before, where each section of the site was done with very custom styling, often conflicting with one another.

The project was a remake of one of my first travel website static sites built initially with HTML, CSS and JS. I wanted to make the project more reusable and scalable with React, but the more I pursued it, the more I felt that I wasn't following best practices (because no one had told me the standard way of writing particular lines of code). I thought some aspects were easier to manage in native languages, like redirecting to other pages instead of using react routing to handle redirects. Then, the realisation that the website built with CRA loses SEO best practices and accessibility anyway. It seems you have to add more frameworks and tooling and steep learning curves to develop what could have been built faster with the native languages.

I still have to deploy it to my portfolio site, maybe work out a CI pipeline process, refactor the code, and organise the files more cleanly. There's certainly room for improvement, but I have to say when I started learning React, I thought I would never get to this position. I believe practising often had a hand in pushing my learning.

Since returning to the UK, I have been settling into the workplace, and we are ready to deploy the project webpages for content editor review. There are some pesky styling issues, but the primary delivery is there.