Showcase

Inspiration

When I was writing my personal website I was thinking about what I want to put on there, what is the one of the top things I would like to show other people so they can learn a little something about me. I know I want to put on my side projects. There are places we connect professionally, on Linkedin; There are places we share all kinds of small things in life, like Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat; There are places we share the code, like GitHub; But isnt a place for us to just share the demo, the idea, the visual result of our work. So that's how I came up with the idea of Showcase, where we can demo, share out thoughts, and people who don't speak tech can also see how we create things.

What it does

Here at Showcase, we share our projects (which we are super proud of but never have the time to show every one of them to other people), find out what technologies are the hottest, and team up to make an awesome idea into code.

How I built it

I clone the MERN stack and then start from scratch. First connect the back end, make sure everything works. Then I focused on front end, learning React as I implement. I also made a draft wire frame for reference.

Challenges I ran into

Originally I want to make the technology part of each project to be like tags, kind of like hashtag on Instagram but with UI. I tried to implement it but then I realize there are too many kinds of programming languages and it will be impossible for me to make all those choices into a list. But if we let the users to add it by themselves, some people will put Javascript, some will but JS but they are actually the same thing. I did not come up with a solution so I moved on to other feature and leave it as Sting for now.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Currently Showcase has some core features, and the home page is looking nice. I used some thoughts on designing, trying to make it appealing to users, and I am very proud how it looks now.

What I learned

Although I had some web development experience before, this is my first time using React. At first I went though a couple of tutorials, read some documentations, then I started to dive into actual coding. I really like how React has a very string component idea, it makes things so much cleaner and easy to implement. I also found some npm and bootstrap and tried them out in Showcase.

What's next for Showcase

There are a few features I would like to finish in the feature, such as the comment feature, like feature for each project. Also how will people find a project to collaborate and how to keep track of how many people each project still need.

Built With

• mern