This week I started building out the front-end for the capstone project. The UI framework our team chose was React. As mentioned in my prior blog posts, before I enrolled in OSU. I had spent thousands of hours self-teaching myself programming and web development. Fortunately for me, React happens to be included in those long hours of self-teaching. I taught myself React back in 2018, when I was getting very little responses to job applications. The goal at the time was to strengthen my resume and eventually get a job. It was interesting to review my React notes from 4 years ago and seeing the massive improvements that I had made in programming and technical knowledge.

Even with changes in the framework and 4 years since I last used this technology, I was able to quickly get up to speed with React and its ecosystem. I believe some of it has to do with the CS 492 elective I took last quarter. Although the Flutter SDK taught in that class is for mobile development. Similar concepts like 1-way data flow, composition over inheritance and props were something that unintentionally refreshed my memory on React. I highly recommend that course to anyone that wants to learn about cross-platform mobile development.

One last thing to add is, I am currently using typescript for the Capstone Project. Although this is a language that I’ve never used before, I am pleasantly surprised with how gentle the learning curve has been. Although it can be difficult to always define data types for your input and output. (What is the data type for an event?!?!) A couple of minutes of Google search always seems to come up with an answer.