Mick: individual project week 1-2

[MickDellaert]

Week 1-2

Repos:

• strapi-chat-front
• strapi-chat-back

Must haves:

• user can see all channels
• user can add new channel
• user can see other users( user can see who send the message)
• user can see a message with a time stamp
• user can send a message
• user can set its user name

Check-In

I Need Help With:

• Thinking in the 'React way': managing state.
• Planning in general: as usual I had an idea on how to build the app, but didn't really make a plan. I tend to just go ahead and face the issues when they present themselves. With my current level of experience I also don't have a clear idea of the challenges ahead of the project.
• I tried to separate the code into components and use a container pattern, trying to make components reusable as well. Doing this I had to do quite some prop drilling and used a composition with props.children for a few components to resolve this. I'm not sure if this a clean way of doing things because logic becomes nested and sometimes hard to track.

What went well?

• In general it went well and it's very nice to work with React when you get the hang of it (a bit). By this I mean working with state and useEffect and to see how the app really becomes 'reactive'.
• I tried to make many commits, still could make more small ones.
• This was the first time I worked with branches on a personal project, which was very useful.

What went less well?

• I got stuck often trying to grab the state, for example making a POST request and immediately setting the state with a .then. The state doesn't get set immediately and this led to some hacky ways trying to resolve this. I also should look into async some more.
• I tried to fetch only a few times, but ended up needing more fetches with different calls in several places, still tried to limit it though.

Lessons Learned

• Still need to work on keeping things organized. Try to plan ahead a bit more and not go at it in an 'impulsive manner'. Less trial and error. Less hackiness. Read some more documentation.