Happy Holidays, everyone! First of all, I must again apologize to those who were expecting Part 3 of my React/Redux blog post series. I finally realized that I needed help with understanding useSelector, Reselect, memoization, etc. As such, I won’t be able to write Part 3 until the end of the week/year. In the meantime, since the end of 2020 is quickly approaching, I have decided to do a little reflection on what I’ve learned and what I want to do going forward. Here are five lessons I learned in 2020, and five goals for 2021.
…To wish you all Happy Holidays! With Christmas just around the corner, it can get overwhelming trying to balance everything holiday-related with programming on a regular basis. It can get easy to slack off, especially since a lot of companies are winding down this time of year. However - and as difficult as this is - it’s important to keep on coding and learning when you can, so that everything stays fresh in your head. With that in mind, here are 10 ways that you can keep on programming while still enjoying the holidays!
Introduction: In my previous blog post, I introduced React hooks, explained how to use them and why, and showed how I refactored my Beach Journal project with them. I used React’s useState and React Redux’s useDispatch hooks to refactor a few of my components. If you haven’t read that blog post yet, I would highly suggest doing so now, as it will get more complicated from here. In this blog post, Part 2, I will demonstrate how I used useDispatch, useEffect, and useSelector to refactor my App component.
Introduction: When I created my React/Redux project, a Beach Journal app, I used class components to store state. In order to share state between components, I passed it as props to child components. If I wanted to use the same logic in multiple components, I wrapped them in a parent container. Stateful class components worked just fine for the project requirements, but in 2018 Dan Abramov and the React team came up with a new and better feature: React hooks! Shortly afterwards, Redux and other libraries followed suit. In these next few blog posts, I’ll summarize what hooks are and demonstrate how I used them to refactor my Beach Journal app.
So, a little background here (no pun intended): I tried to replace one of my blog’s default background pictures with my own. That ultimately didn’t work, but I had already pushed my changes to GitHub by the time I found that out. After some lengthy research and some trial and error, I managed to revert these changes. In doing so, I learned how to use a handy GitHub feature! It allows you to view the state of your entire repository at a given point in time.