Tag Archives: React

Week 8 at The Iron Yard

We continued our work in React JavaScript this week, with an introduction to Horizon and RethinkDB to facilitate placing data on a web page. Our exercise this week was to develop a chat application. At the end of class on Tuesday, I was feeling discouraged because I had worked all afternoon and not made much progress with the code. However, by the end of class Wednesday, I was making significant progress, and on Thursday I was seeing satisfactory results.

There are still some subtleties in the code that I am working to grasp. However, I realized that while I may not understand everything completely at this point, I am gaining more familiarity with the code the more I work with it.

I also had some difficulties uploading code to GitHub; again, because of not realizing the ways that GitHub handles uploaded files. Fortunately, Jim (our instructor) was able to suggest the appropriate instructions to get things working again.

I also discussed my idea for my project for “Demo Day” with Jim, and was able to define some realistic goals.

Jim says one more week of lecture, and then we begin work on our graduation projects for “Demo Day.” This promises to be exciting.

Week 7 at The Iron Yard

We continued our work on React this week. Our activities included splitting our previously written JavaScript code (in earlier assignments) into Component modules, and learning web navigation using the Router tag. We also learned how to set up scripts to install webpack functionality, and how to reference fonts within React components. I’m impressed with the results of our coding exercises: we are building more and more sophisticated web pages.

When discussing our progress for the week, one of my fellow students remarked that the times when we think, “Oh, yes, we’re getting this” are often accompanied by thoughts of, “oh, no, this is really hard and will we ever understand this?” Certainly I have felt this way, though I know from past coding experience that eventually, yes, I will understand this, and having moments when I wonder if I ever will are part of the process (though undoubtedly frustrating at the time).

In any event, looking forward to seeing what we can build next week.