When I started this project, I was a pure vanilla Javascript developer, and I wanted to take my Single Page Application skills to the next level.
So I sat down, bought a course on Udemy, and started building RCT Cloth.
It’s live and hosted on Heroku, and along the way, I’ve blogged about what I’ve learned as well.
I’m grateful to have had the chance and time to build this project out, and it’s got a ton of helpful stuff going on under the hood.
We’re using Firebase on the backend. We started with a subscriber pattern lsitening for changes (my preferred method coming from games) but then switched over to an async fetch pattern later on in the course to get familiar with storing the state of whether or not we’re currently loading the state.
We built out a number of higher order components for the site to keep things nice and DRY and learned about the Container pattern.
We styled components with sass and with styled-components (which I prefered 🤷🏻♂️), integrated GraphQL for search, moved from Redux to Hooks for storing state, and implemented the ContextAPI.
In short, this project tried to mimic a heavily engineered production application as closely as possible. It’s way over-engineered as a single-person project, but I’m really glad for the experience, and it’s taught me a ton about React and the React environment.
I’m super excited to apply all this knowledge into my next React project with more real-world impact.
