Half way — and now they introduced Voldemort… 🥺
This week we passed the half way mark of the bootcamp. I can’t even explain how fast everything just runs by when you enter a new magical world. Because that’s how it feels. Magical.
Even though I know there’s nothing magical about coding (really, it’s only logic and an exact combination of characters), there is nothing with more magic shimmer to it than the moment when it all suddenly ✨works✨.
However, the task of this week was to create a mobile app with React Native, and let’s just say that this project was the spirit of Voldemort. React Native has unlimited amount of horocruxes (of which I found and destroyed none) and I’m not joking when I say the wrinkles on my forehead this week were pretty damn similar to a lightning. ⚡️🧹
I did survive though. And as I wrote in my pull request, an app was created. End of story. Maybe React Native and I will meet again in the future, if so, I will definitely come more prepared.
On to this week’s scope… 🌟
Questions (and Aha!-moments) of the week
“Again, is there any ACTUAL way of passing data from a child component to parent in react?”
So this question came back to haunt me. Luckily Ania Kubów uploaded a video the other day explaining exactly this. See the full 8 minutes 👉 here.
“How do I show different components in React depending on <insert random condition here>?”
One of my most valuable articles these past weeks has been this one. By mastering conditional rendering, you can do pretty much anything on a site (ah well, almost). It’s the MVP of your survey site and your knight in bright armor when working with fetch and/or state hooks. Just read it. 👉 Here.
“How do I prevent a navigation-item to ‘jump’ when assigned a border-bottom on hover?”
This is probably easy peasy for most people, but it was really an Aha!-moment for me when I saw this snippet of code at https://thingtesting.com/. The answer? You simply add a transparent border-bottom to the object, and change the color of it on hover. Brilliant! 🌟 (And honestly, will you look at that nice piece of web design?!)
“Is it okay to use disabled buttons from an accessibility point of view?”
I’ve worked with quite a few buttons so far during this journey. And ever since we got introduced to accessibility I’ve been thinking a lot about how to implement accessibility-functions to my web apps. There is so much more to accessibility than one would think, especially when it comes to interaction. A survey or a form where the user has to enter his or her name would be much easier to use if the user knew what was expected of them in the first place, instead of encountering a disabled button when trying to submit.
Working with custom validation a couple of weeks ago made me realize that there’s a lot one can do to simplify the experience, both for visually impaired, people with disabilities or basically anyone, by just adding a few lines of code. But to answer the question, as of now it’s perfectly fine, but according to the author of this article, we might see a change of guidelines in the future. 🔮
Best read of the week
My best read of this week is this article on the learning experience of a junior developer. So many wise thoughts and reminders that we all learn things differently, forget about stuff and get afraid and anxious when we fail.
When you start learning, you lay down neural pathways that make it easier to retrieve information. According to Neuroscience research, these pathways only get strong through frequency of use, not just intensity. This means 30 minutes a day, for 5 days a week is way better than 2.5 hours one day, only once a week.
Demo-time!
A multipage movie-browser using The Movie DB-API and React
The main purpose of this week was to try out React Router and work with a multipage web app. It was great fun, and the more I worked with it, the more pages I wanted to create. React is FUN! 🌈
An app created in React Native, using navigation, share functionality and fetching data from an API
Here it is. The spawn of Voldemort. ☠️ Jokes aside, this project was insightful and valuable in a different way than the other projects. Even if my main goal not is to create apps for a living, at least I know the basics on how they’re made and what I can put on my wishlist whenever working with an app developer in the future. 😅💁♀️
So, here I am, 22:09 on a Saturday. It’s time to shove the computer under the sofa and enjoy what’s left of this weekend before it’s time to take on the next half of this bootcamp. And YAY, Redux is coming!
