While I’m thankful to the OSU CS program for a lot, one of the things I’m most appreciative of is a firm foundation with which to become comfortable scouring the internet for resources, tutorials, and documentation to self-teach new skills. Primarily, this experience has manifested itself through learning the MERN stack, or more specifically becoming comfortable with React.
Unfortunately, I missed the CS 290 redesign. So when CS 361 and CS 340 rolled around and my team wanted to produce web applications using the MERN stack, it was time to learn something new.
I started by watching some YouTube tutorials: “Learn React in 30 minutes”, “Everything You Need to Know About React”, etc. Then after I felt somewhat comfortable following along in VS Code, copying the often-overeager virtual teachers, I branched out into reading through React’s official documentation and a variety of articles and blog posts for more specific questions I had about features and implementation.
But it was time to refactor (and by refactor, I intended on rebuilding it from the ground up). I spent a good portion of the next week or so re-Googling and re-reading resources to find better ways to implement my program. Components were rewritten, program logic was adjusted, and after several dozen hours of headache-inducing work, Game Night Calculator was back with a shiny new undercoat. And over the next few months, even after the quarter ended, I have continued improving the app, adding new features, and learning new things as I go along.
Now I’ve come to Capstone, where my group has been assigned to reproduce and update Craigslist. Although I was looking forward to the possibility of learning a new skillset through a capstone project, I’m nevertheless excited that I can further improve and expand my web development knowledge. I’ve become our team’s “React/Front-End Expert” (a title I never thought I’d have), and am excited to lead the front-end work for a slick new Craigslist clone. The project requirements accurately feel like a capstone project: applying all the skills and knowledge I’ve acquired thus far while also stretching and challenging me to learn new ones.
