September 2024 Study Summary

 

Hi lovely people.

Here is what I spent September learning and working on:

• React
• Tailwind
  
• Typescript
  

 

I've finally finished the React portion of the excellent and long course I was doing (Hands-on React: 25+ Projects Featuring Next.js, TypeScript, Prisma, Zod, Shadcn, Axios, Router 6, Query 5, Redux Toolkit).

The course also includes follow-on sections teaching Typescript and Next.js. I've just finished the Typescript section today, and will do Next.js next. Both of these are gaining in popularity and heading towards becoming industry standard, so are important to incorporate, I think.

 

Impressions of Typescript

I felt immediately at home with Typescript because of my C# background - it effectively introduces and enforces type checking in Javascript, thereby allowing many bugs caused by Javascript's loose syntax to be caught at build time rather than having mysterious errors emerge at runtime. C# always had this, so to me this is how a language should be. It means that VSCode pops up with helpful squiggly lines and tooltips that really aid the development process, objecting to things that would have slipped through in vanilla JS/React.

The concept of generics is really the only complicated thing in Typescript, but since it exists in C# too, is wasn't too hard to get to grips with. Going over it again has helped sharpen my C# too, in fact.

Porting an existing project over to Typescript would be non-trivial, depending on its complexity, but for any new front-end project I will always now start with Typescript.

Impressions of Tailwind

Tailwind is good too and also something I will use by default from now on. It feels more of an incremental improvement over regular CSS than a complete game-changer, but once I'm more familiar with the specific styling commands, I can see it saving a lot of time. Especially as CSS itself was new to me and something I only learned last month.

As part of the course we incorporated some pre-made components from Daisy UI, which offers an even quicker way of piecing together Tailwind-styled elements.

 

Impressions of React

React is great, and I'm excited to finally get to use it in some projects, which I'll start on as soon as I've finished the last part of the course: Next.js. The whirlwind tour through Redux Toolkit, Router and Query were the hardest parts, but mostly that's just in the initial set-up, after which using them is fairly straightforward. I've been grateful to have Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT to answer questions whenever I've been stuck or unclear on something. How people achieved anything before LLMs is already beyond me.

Thanks for following my journey.