As I complete my final portfolio project, I’m amazed at all that I’ve learned. The first 2/3 of the curriculum that took so long to master, were such a quick and small part of my final project. When I started, individual React and Redux concepts swirled around in my head. But, after watching a full end-to-end build, attending some study groups, re-reading many of the lessons, and diving into my own project, the concepts started to come together into the cohesive whole.
My final project is Needful. It is sort of a mix between eBay and a thrift store and was born out of the idea of donating items you no longer need to someone who truly needs them. While thrift stores seem to mostly accomplish this, you can never be sure that your donation went to someone who needed it, you also have no control over the price, and shopping at a thirft store can be quite a treasure hunt. While my project has not yet solved for a donation going to someone who truly needs it, it does allow for control over price and the ability for items to come together in one place. While this is similar to eBay’s online marketplace, it’s differentied by it’s focus on getting things to people who need them and offering them for free or a low price.
While most parts of the app were easy to spin up, I ran into issues with async fetch requests and props coming back as undefined. I explored quite a few solutions to this, including adding loading actions, introducing useEffect() to one of my components, and restructuring where data is getting passed in. Also, I had never incorporated CSS into React before, so that was a new element that I spent some time doing some research on.