WDI Day Fifty-Two: React Research

Today was more of an open-ended day. We had the option to work on a React JS lab or spend the day researching a technology of our choosing. I decided to do some serious document diving with React. Front-end frameworks are tough, especially for someone who is being exposed to them for the first time. So I did my best not to get frustrated when I wasn’t learning as quickly as I’d like to.

One thing that was pretty helpful was walking through the React Router tutorial. It gave me a better sense of how all the files are tied together in React, however, I still have a lot more practice to do before I feel fully comfortable with the framework.

WDI Day Fifty: Completed Lab & React Router and React with Backend

This morning our MEAN Stack and Web socket lab was due. I decided to work on something simple in order to help me get a better understanding of the technologies used, so I worked on a game of tic tac toe. Web sockets are pretty fascinating, and I hope to incorporate them into a few future projects.

tictactoe-screenshot

So far, the game doesn’t do everything that I’d like it to do. I haven’t used the database to persist the game data, so that’s one thing to add to my ‘to do’ list. I’d also like to add the following:

  • Prompting the user for their name
  • When users chat, having their names appear beside any remark made
  • Scoring

The rest of the day we did a code review of a React to do list application. React definitely seems a little easier than Angular to pick up, but I find myself wanting to spend a good chunk of time to building and piecing apart applications in order to get a better understanding of Angular as well as React.