I might be judged for admitting this, but when I was a child, I was the type that would peak at Christmas presents every chance I could get. I couldn’t help myself! I hated the idea of being surprised or unprepared for what would be come. I’d like to think this was merely a consequence of immaturity, but if I’m honest with myself, to this day I am a very difficult person for whom to plan a surprise due to similar behaviors.
That’s all to say that I remember a week or two after starting the program with Flatiron School, I decided to peak ahead and at the the last page of the curriculm: The React/Redux Portfolio Project. I scanned through it and while I was (mostly) sure that it was written in English, the vast majority of it read like a foreign language to me. It was a surreal feeling when I finally clicked through to that final page in a more chronological fashion, but it goes to show the vast amount I’ve been able to learn over the past several months.
I had the biggest struggle with picking a concept for this project than I have for any of the others. I had a difficult time committing to an idea that I both liked and felt I could properly bring to life. More importantly, I wanted to show some diversity among the projects I have created. While I have liked everything I have made thus far, one issue I believe exists with my previous applications is that they are not easy for someone to ‘hop into’ and immediately get a feel for the functionality and corresponding code. Because of this, I found myself gravitating towards concepts that would require minimal initial user input before being able to operate. That’s why I liked the idea of creating some kind of game, and from that logic the idea for ‘TriviaPro’ came to fruition.
In truth I was rather nervous about approaching this application because I was worried about my foundational skills with React and Redux. However, I found a lot of it to be relatively straightforward. This project gave me a much greater appreciation for React and the functionality it provides. I thought I would never find a framework whose logic and operational flow I liked more than Rails and the MVC pattern, but React definitely is starting to become competition!
I can’t say that a trivia game is the most exciting project I will ever come up with or work on, but I am very content with the end result. In particular, CSS is something that I feel like I have had struggles with, and although I did utilize Bootstrap to setup most of the foundations of the styling, I became much more confident with CSS/HTML as the result of some constant tweaking. As of now, I feel confident saying that it’s by far my most attractive application that I have built!