App Development: Odds and Ends

My first React app is now live. It’s called “Track Your Cash” and is a simplified checkbook register.

The project uses React, React Router 4, and Redux, and runs on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu-based NGINX server.

• “Track Your Cash” Demo: https://kdcinfo.com/app/register/
  (this will redirect to Digital Ocean’s IP address)

• View the code on GitHub: https://github.com/KDCinfo/track-your-cash

This was a tedious project resulting in code I’m not overly proud of, and am still finding my own pattern for architecting Redux, local state, and props. Many days were lost to refactoring whilst determining state structure, higher-order components, and callback functions. I also delved into learning client-side web storage, and created a React component for the native ‘date’ input type (with non-native fallback support per MDN documentation).

Unfortunately I cannot place this project in my Laravel / Vue site space, as those 3 sites run on Apache, and React requires a back-end server that can handle the route switches, such as Node or NGINX. And because I’m not up for buying a domain for this (DNS), instead I just implemented a meta refresh that redirects to the Digital Ocean IP address.

It is my hope that doing another 3-5 of these should put me in good shape for a React development position sometime this year.

As a side note, I started learning React/Redux/RR4 on Apr 12. That’s about even, if not a little less than, with what Vue took for me to learn and complete my first project.

-Keith