Recently, I’ve been building an application that requires me to connect a React frontend to a Rails backend. The backend was pulling in data from an external API and I wanted to be able to fetch that data via AJAX to render on my frontend. One of the tools I…

Recently, I’ve been exploring topics that I learned early in my JavaScript education, but that have faded to some degree or another because they’ve been replaced by more efficient techniques, by methods built-in to libraries like React or simply because time has worked its magic on my mind. The for…

One of the strange things that happens as you expand your coding toolset is that you often learn some of the more challenging concepts first, only to discover easier ways to accomplish the same feats later on. Ultimately, this is a good thing, because you don’t just want to learn…

The first major task in my attempt to build a better, more efficient and React-based version of my favorite project LoreScroll was to set up my backend. I needed an API to store the Story, Setting and Character data generated by my users that I could later fetch and display…

One of my favorite early coding projects was a Ruby On Rails application called LoreScroll that was designed to help storytellers organize their worlds, characters and stories in a single, easy-to-navigate tool. It was an ambitious idea that worked out, but not at the scale I was hoping. …

About a week into developing my final project for Flatiron School — BoardGameShelf — I started stubbing out some routes using the node package React Router Dom. However, I quickly began running into console errors that I hadn’t anticipated. Based on my knowledge, the code was correctly laid out. …

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve examined React Hooks and how they help us to make our code simpler and more efficient: useState() allows us to utilize state within a functional component. useEffect() allows us to emulate lifecycle methods within a functional component. While there are many…

Last week, I started my exploration of React Hooks with the most prominent option of the bunch: useState(). This hook allows us to initialize and set state within a functional component — an essential tool in React development. But there are other hooks that are equally as useful. …

Just as I was wrapping up the final lines of code in my very last project for Flatiron School, excited to graduate and begin my job search, a whole new section of curriculum was dropped. Eager to finish, I completed my project without looking back. …