This week, I was trying to work on my personal site. I started this months and months ago, and created most of the site with pure HTML and CSS with the addition of some Bootstrap features. After speaking with some classmates, I decided that I should be using a static site generator. Enter Jekyll - which is the most popular static site generator for years running.
So now that I’ve graduated the Flatiron School, I have a lot going on with job searching, being a Tech Coach at Flatiron, and doing some side work for friends, but I have also started working on a new React/Redux app to keep my skills sharp, and I’m going to blog my process. It’s called Is it Wet? 💦 (hehe), and the goal is to let a user search for a location and see the current forcast and the past few days of weather to determine if conditions are wet. I like to climb, and since I live in Charleston, SC, the closest outdoor climbing is about 4 hours away. It is SUPER annoying when I drive all the way to North Carolina based on a clear weather forecast for the day only to find the rock is too moist to climb on.
I added a Google Map to my React/Redux final project, and I ran into some issues doing this for the first time. It isn’t hard, but there are some key things you need to know! I will go through how I added and did some basic styling on my map.
When I started my React/Redux project, I knew I wanted to add filters (what good restaurant related app doesn’t have filters?!?). I assumed this would be easy enough since they are ubiquitous on the web, but I was at a loss about how to implement this. Thanks to Luke, I got some direction, which I will share with you here. I want to preface this by saying, I do not know if this is the BEST way to do this. I haven’t gotten feedback on it yet, but I know that it works. I will update if this is a dumb way to do it :)
Whoa! Last project! When I first started this course, I expected the final project to be a giant and complete review of everything I learned. While it was a review, I also tackled a few new ideas. The resulting application seems a lot simpler than some of my previous work - especially my Rails/jQuery project. My final project is a single page application with a Rails API for the backend and a front end created with React and Redux. It is a lunch restaurant finder/recommender for Charleston, SC (where I’m from!). My backend pulls local data from the Yelp Fusion API. On the front end, the user can see a list of restaurants open for lunch in downtown Charleston and filter the list of those restaurants by price, location (zip code), and if they allow takeout. The user can also get a recommendation for a lunch restaurant and view a map in the browser with the restaurant’s location. Additionally, to fulfill my requirement for a POST request, I added an option for users to select different hashtags for each restaurant that can provide additional information about the place.