Working On A React Project Without Knowing React

These past few days I’ve been putting a lot of work in the Chingu project. I’m really enjoying it, but working on React without knowing React is pretty tough!

MERN App Setup

I think the reason it’s a bit difficult is because we are setting up the basic structure of our MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) app; the trouble is that I know the MEN part and no R, while one of my other teammates is learning the R but doesn’t know the MEN part. So getting them to link with each of us working on what we know has been a challenge!

To start, we set up the front end and backend servers successfully, but then it came time to link them. I worked on a few different things for hours but couldn’t get it working. Then my teammate found a recent article that shows an approach to making it work, and it did, but as it’s not a custom-fit for our needs, there’s still a bit of work to do—namely, the demo doesn’t include a database at all.

To make things more complicated, somehow the copy-paste from this demo includes older versions of some of the dependency packages…one of which won’t even run the code on my computer because there’s a space in the folder path (insert facepalm!!)! So pretty stuck for the moment, but we’ll come to a way forward eventually.

Other Stuff

I’ve had less time to write posts recently, but I finished the UX course I started a long while ago finally, and now have started a Product Manager course to see if that’s an interest.

Up Next

Continue courses & Chingu work. Oh and move countries :P