Some are worth it but not all bootcamps are created equal.

You can ignore all the marketing videos, blogs, and workshops that these bootcamps have thrown at you. They all claim that they’ll change your life and that they’re the best option. The only real indicator that a bootcamp will deliver on their words is if they spent the time and cost to update their course to match the current industry needs because that is a lot of work and investment but shows that they are truly an education first business rather than a profit-first business.

Is the material up…

I know how you feel, it can seem overwhelming. There are dozens of languages to choose from and even if you’re only picking from the top 3, everyone says learn them all eventually, but dang that’s a lot to commit to when you don’t even know where to start. In the next 3 minutes, we’ll answer your question of where to start, or more accurately you’ll answer your own question with a little bit of dialogue with me.

There’s conflicting advice out there, each making different claims. Some say learn Python because it’s the fastest growing language and it’s really…

Making a multiplayer game with React Hooks is hard

Previously I mentioned that I had ported a large chunk of the backend logic to the frontend and some of that code was using recursivesetTimeout to achieve unit movements and attacks. I said I would convert setTimeout to React.useEffect hook. Well I did, and the result is less than splendid.

From a developer point of view, the code is much cleaner and easier to wrap my head around than the previous recursive setTimeout, but from a player’s perspective, this has been disappointing. …

Yes to “single source of truth” until it starts working against you.

Conventions are great and I used to follow them so closely as if they were the undeniable law in programming. However as I grew and encountered more different problems as an engineer in my professional work and in my hobby projects, I found conventions are a great place to start, but each app or sometimes even each feature has its own quirks and nuances where conventions begin to work against what you’re trying to do.

The problem with WaddleWaddle is that there is a lot of code running…

The redux-optimist library has been extremely helpful to me, and I’d like to share that with you. I’ve designed a simple tutorial where I’ll walk you through how to set up and use the middleware. We’re going to use a sweet Pokémon API as our demo practice. We’ll fetch this Pikachu and optimistically evolve it to Raichu. If the request fails, then we’ll devolve back to Pikachu.

1. Let’s install the dependencies we need, in your terminal:
   yarn create react-app app-name
cd app-name
yarn add react-dom
yarn add react-router-dom
yarn add react-redux
yarn add redux
yarn add redux-thunk
yarn add lodash
2. …

Learn SCSS features with simple create-react-app

1. In terminal:

create-react-app scss-demo
cd scss-demo
npm i node-sass
npm start

2. Rename App.css to App.scss

3. In App.js, on line 3 change import './App.css'; to import 'App.scss';

4. Take a look at App.scss, then replace the code in App.scss with this:

Notice in the following scss code that we can:
a) Make variables with the $ symbol
b) Have nested element tags that reflect our HTML hierarchy

This should look exactly like the create-react-app default page like what we’re used to seeing.

5. Let’s say we want to make the “Edit src/App.js…

A really quick tutorial

Prerequisites: Knowledge of React.js will be required for this tutorial.

Let’s say you want to pull data from the frontend of a website because there’s no API available. You inspect the page and see that the data is available in the HTML, so how do you gather that information to be used in your app? It’s rather simple, we’re going to install two libraries and write less than 50 lines of code to demonstrate the scraping of a website. To keep this tutorial simple, we’ll use https://pokedex.org/ as our example.

1. In terminal:

create-react-app scraping-demo
cd scraping-demo
npm i…

Prerequisites: Knowledge of React.js will be required for this tutorial.

We’re going to use google-translate library to help connect your app with Google Translate API, the library also provides methods to initiate the translating. We’ll also use react-cookies library to store a user’s chosen language in the browser for the user’s convenience and we’ll store some translated text in a cookie so that the same sentence doesn’t have to be re-translated every time the user loads the app (you have to pay per translation, try to avoid redundant translating).

1. Let’s get started, in terminal:

create-react-app google-translate-demo
cd google-translate-demo
npm i google-translate
npm i…