Summarizing The Course

Javascript • React • Redux

The course is over for me as well now. The app ended up really good and I now have a great code base to keep working on. Their are some small bugs left and the code need to be cleaned up so that only the top level React components is aware of the Redux Store. Then there is still some features I would like to implement. I'm using the GitHub repo for planning and have opened two issues to fix and also a roadmap for what to implement next. But that will not be part of this course, now the app will have to survive on it's own.

My thoughts on the course

The reason why I wanted to go this course where to get better at Javascript. Not because I liked Javascript but because I sucked at Javascript and didn't like it but realised that if I wanted to become a web developer I had to learn Javascript. Before this course the only libraries I had used where jQuery and Bootstrap. I had no excperience with Javascript frameworks, except from a minor Express app using VS boilerplate. Now when the course is over I have learned not only use but to love ES2015/2016, Webpack, React and Redux. I really enjoyed using the Webpack build process to boundle, minify and transpile my project to a single ES5 file. This way I no longer had to care about one of the most frustrating thing with Javascript, not being able to actually use all the cool stuff until they have already gone old. I could use all the good stuff found in ES2015/2016 without having to use caniuse.com before using any newer ES-stuff. I also really liked using React and Redux, as you could see in my previous post the architecture become really nice and scalable. That where before this course also one of the issues I hade with Javascript, how to organize the code and the application in a good way. It's easy to do in for example the frameworks provided by ASP.NET but I had (almost) never used a frameworks for Javascript before. Using a (or two) framework(s) I no longer had to focus on how to structure the code (or well, I had to learn the frameworks first of course) but could focus solely on the code quality itself. That made it possible for me to learn more about Javascript itself.

What was good

As you probably can tell I am really happy with this course! I have enjoyed more or less all part of it. First I where a bit put of by the fact that we where not going to have any lectures in the course. But it turned out that the documentation where really good so instead it where fun to learn new frameworks using the official documentation. I also liked the personal skype meetings where we could ask question and also show what we had done and ask about how to move on etc. Slack was mostly good, it where some very interesting discussions although sometime the level where way to high since some already knew the frameworks and sometime there where just no way of catching up what had been written after you had been away for a while. But I got a lot of good answers from Slack and it's always nice to feel that you're not alone in the course. I also thought the idea with doing PR on eachother projects where a fun idea, even though I didn't have so much time for it myself and the PR I got did more harm than good.

What was bad

I would have appreciate a quick start for Webpack (or another build process) since that feels like something that you more or less have to use when using React/JSX and ES2015. I also got the advice to skip Redux first and implement it later on but looking back I think it would have helped to start doing a small React/Redux application and then scale it up to a real app. Now that I implemented Redux later on I didn't really know the best practice and had already implemented some features that should be in Redux and the Redux implementation got a bit so so in the end. But I'm not sure what would be the best way to learn React and Redux, maybe I would just started to mix them up if I started to implement Redux earlier. This way at least I knew React fairly well before implementing Redux.

Yours sincerely,
Oskar Klintrot

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