This week’s progress is definitely a bit more stalled than last week. We had to integrate react into our existing vanilla JS project and I spent some time early in the week figuring out how to do that. Then, it was diving straight into styled components and figuring out how that works that took some more getting used to. Refactoring the header and footer to styled components took some time but then once it was time to build the rest of the product details page’s layout, I got more comfortable. I think I still don’t know how to fully utilize the benefits of styled components to appreciate its design. In theory, it’s supposed to help with modularity (easier tracking of CSS with it being component-based) and dynamic styling.

We also had some government people come to visit to listen to our presentations and attended a workshop on sharing learning tips. Our company mentors came for the government event as well and we spent some time chatting afterwards, which was so nice. They’re very friendly as usual and made us feel comfortable askig questions. I’m very excited for the 2-week project Gwen and I will be doing with them.

How this past week went

What was working?

• Having your own ideas for how to implement something and why is very important. Being able to explain my code to someone else (not just what but why) is a skill I want to improve on.
• Writing “robust” code is important, e.g. you shouldn’t have to drastically refactor in the future if more data is pulled in.
• Also learned that naming stuff like functions and variable should be self-descriptive as much as possible. This will reduce the needs for comments. But at this stage, I still prefer using comments everywhere to remind myself of what I’m doing.

Reminders to self

• Rebasing is a tiresome process, even more so than programming the logic itself because mistakes are deadly. But still, you should rebase often! And, you could always make a backup branch before the rebase process in case something goes horribly wrong.
• Done over perfection. Especially if you’re under a time crunch.