TDAR 1

Inspiration

One of my friends had the idea for a company developing film for ten dollars a roll and mentioned she needed someone to develop an app, one that be able to collect order information, essentially. I was just learning React and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with stone in doing as a Hack the North project.

What it does

I don't honestly have too much to show for my work today, but I wanted to write something up as a reflection because I think I'll get me out of this as a learning experience if I do.

As of right now, I got my Expo environment setup and I earlier in the day (I realize I forgot to commit/save) I had a carousel of sliding images that was supposed to represent a home screen.

How I built it

Watched a lot of YouTube tutorials, especially those about React Native/Expo and Formik. Was planning to look more into Firebase as I went for the backend but didn't get that far.

Challenges I ran into

Node/Yarn were really, really a pain. I spent at least an hour this morning dealing with dependencies and similar; Yarn, Expo, and Homebrew all separately gave me issues, and I spent a bunch of time on StackOverflow trying to trace from one issue to another; for example, Yarn wouldn't correctly install a package and to fix it I needed to update Homebrew, but updating Homebrew didn't work, etc.

I also had trouble with GitHub to begin with. I couldn't get git to track the expo project because it had its own .git file in it which I had to figure out how to remove.

Overall, I bumbled around a lot in React just because I am still new to it; some learning curve swapping from React to React Native (i.e. instead of

) and with the file system of a React project (i.e. export default MyForm).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Firstly, I really carved out time for this hackathon, which I was proud of; I moved a few things today so I'd have more time to work on my project, and moved stuff tomorrow in hopes that I'd get some time there too.

More than that, I really gritted with some of the technical hiccups here. I should note that I thought I had most of the day tomorrow and so I didn't budget my time in the way I would've, but I'm proud with the amount that I stuck with some of the more difficult technical stuff and worked to solve my own problems.

What I learned

• npm and Yarn are not trivial! I'm in the middle of the freeCodeCamp course right now and assumed that the APIs and microservices bit would be super unecessary because of how simple it is (seriously, 28 lessons about "yarn add"?), but I had a lot of trouble here

• I always forget to start small, and to go as small as possible. To my credit, I really did try that there; I tried to get, say, one form element to show up, and if I couldn't on one tutorial I'd watch and try another. At the same time, I should've been testing more as I went! For example, putting text in each component just to make sure it is showing up, etc.

• StackOverflow and Google really do help! I think so much of programming is learning how to effectively search for problems; I'd previously not learned this because I was trying to adhere to collaboration policies in various CS courses, but it's clear that learning some of this tech from scratch requires a very different skillset, and that effective "solving your own problems" is a huge part of that—in the middle of the hackathon, after 15 or 20 minutes trying to solve something I posted for help from a mentor, and then solved it myself a few minutes later!

• I really do need to hone and practice my React skills more! I'm definitely getting better but I want to finish the freeCodeCamp projects and put together some more little fiddles just to learn.

What's next for TDAR

I'm planning to probably build this app starting from scratch at another hackathon, and in the mean time am going to try and finish the next few freeCodeCamp projects to learn more. Thank you to the organizers of HTN for a great weekend!

Built With

• expo.io
• formik
• react-native