Week 12 is already gone! I cannot believe I am writing my last blog post that will follow along with the weekly structure of the School of Code. These twelve weeks have been an amazing challenge and experience! But it is obviously not over yet and come Monday I will be starting a four week project as a brand new team of six to end off the entire SoC experience.
Anyway. On to what I did this week. It has been a mixed bag of all things job prep, javascript and typescript!
React Libraries
On Monday we opened pandoras box and dived into react libraries. I am sure you most likely already know but if you don't in short react libraries are a compilation of various components that have been pre written for you. If you navigate documentation you can put them into your projects!Sounds great right?
Well if you think so you'd be right! And wrong...
Like everything in software development everything comes with trade offs. We got to experience those trade offs on Monday. The key points I would consider for the pros of react libraries include the speed of spin up and the fact you know they'll display consistently across your project. Cons however include things like the time spent navigating documentation, the size of the libraries themselves and the limited control you have over them.
Portfolio
This kind of links to react libraries so I'm going to mention it here. On Tuesday we got to work on our own portfolios (when mine is deployed you'll find it on joshpattison.com so if that isn't the url of my blog page head over there and take a look!). I decided to take this time to explore completely new things to me, I dived into next.js as my framework and decided to try out tailwind css. It was of course a challenge diving into something brand new but I am glad for the experience and it has broadened my knowledge on react frameworks! I'll continue to develop my portfolio using these tools.TypeScript
The rest of the week was spent learning a whole new language. Typescript! We started off our exploration by looking into the pros and cons of this language and it was clear to see them throughout the rest of the week. The cons are more around the time investment into learning and using typescript at the start of your projects but the pros are around the robustness of code, improved intelisense {I would love someone to tell me how to spell this???} and preventing runtime errors by having them highlighted to you before you run your code. I can see how a larger project would really benefit from it and how maybe it isn't as important for a tiny project or a proof of concept piece of work.We then started converting .js projects in to .ts projects. it was a unique experience and it was a nice challenge of trying to understand the prewritten code and then converting it into a brand new language! Then it came to typescript in react which was a whole new challenge! Again a fun one, the dopamine you get from breaking down the barriers you face will never bore me! After getting to grips with it (loosely) we did our final hackathon! We created a simple TypeScript React weather app using the OpenWeatherMap api! In all honesty it was a great way to end the hackathon experiences with a lovely mix of challenge and reward!
Well that just about sums up week twelve! Before we dive into the main take away from each week I think it is important to mention that moving into project month will change my post frequency for the bootcamper's blog series. I am planning to one large blog post for the whole project talking about the process and experiences I have along the way! This is of course subject to change but I thought I'd share my current plans with you lovely readers!
My main take away from each day in Week Twelve.
Monday -
React libraries! It was interesting to see the pros and cons in action; super quick spin up but using someone else’s code can have unexpected outcomes or problems.
Tuesday -
I decided to challenge myself and use some new tools. So I spent Tuesday with next.js and tailwind css!
Wednesday -
I will never forget that the type of NaN is in fact a number! The afternoon was my first real dive into typescript!
Thursday -
Worked with typescript again - specifically in React
Friday -
The final hackathon Friday at the School of Code :( We made a typescript/react weather app!
If you've got this far, thank you! Week Twelve was a great end to the standard structure of the School of Code! If you want to follow along with my journey please do. If you want to contact me for any reason also the best place to connect with me is Twitter - @_pattisoj. You can also find my GitHub here. I hope you have a good week and, as always, happy coding!