TSTUFF | Second Build Week Complete!

September 03, 2019

Yesterday was the official last day of our second Build Week at Lambda School.

To recap, the project I worked on is TSTUFF - an app for tech enthusiasts who want to rent or rent out tech equipment.

Repo: https://github.com/bw-use-my-tech-stuff/Front-End
Deployed App: https://tstuff-frontend.netlify.com/

This was the toughest project I've worked on during Lambda School, by far.

The biggest challenge I encountered was handling authentication and making authenticated requests to the backend API. The prior lessons in the curriculum had zero information about authentication (it's covered in the upcoming modules), so it was unexpected. Thankfully I had a great project Team Lead, Jonathan, who showed my partner Julian and I how to use JWTs (JSON Web Tokens) and jwt-decode to make authenticated requests with axios.

The second biggest challenge was figuring out how to manage state alongside async requests in all of the different components. Jonathan showed us how to use async/await instead of promises, and the cleaner syntax helped me to understand and work through the logic more clearly. I'm definitely looking forward to learning how to use Redux to manage state in a more predicable and centralized manner.

There were a few times when I felt like giving up and felt tempted to ask Lambda School if I could just repeat this module (they have a 'flex' option which allows students to do so). But in the end, I'm glad I pushed through.

TSTUFF isn't perfect and lacks polish, but it meets the following project MVP requirements:

  • Users can login and create a profile
  • Users can set up items they have for rent, such as cameras, TVs, party equipment, etc.
  • Users can Create, Read, Update and Delete their rental item data
  • Users can login and see items that other users have for rent, and ask to rent those items

Overall, it was a challenging two weeks but I learned a lot.

I'm looking forward to learning some advanced React and Redux!

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