So, over the course of this Capstone project, building a visualization tool for Fire/EMS professionals, the primary technology my team and I have been using is the React Javascript framework. It’s a powerful JavaScript library used for building user interfaces by breaking down pieces of a webpage into ‘components’, giving them characteristics and capabilities and passing them around the logic of your code like functions. This makes making code modular and reusable fairly easy and intuitive because that mentality is baked right into the framework’s design philosophy. In general, it’s been fun to learn how to use because it’s so widely adopted in the industry and I’d been meaning to spend more time with it.

In our project, React is used on the client-side to create dynamic and interactive visualizations for the end-users. So far, extending the previous team’s work has not been too difficult, though there have been some growing pains with learning how to make certain libraries play nicely together.

I’m sure there’s easy ways to do this but it would be nice to know exactly how React is implementing vanilla Javascript under the hood and how the DOM is being manipulated, at least for my own sense of understanding and competence. So far, we haven’t used any other tools in the general React ecosystem, like Redux or any complex CSS tools like Tailwind but we may in the future. Overall though, I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to work as part of a team on this project and with this particular piece of technology.