I spent a great deal of time assembling the site using CakePHP and ended up with something I was fairly pleased with. But then a couple of things happened.
The ReactJS Logo. A giant spinning version appears when you create an app.The first thing happened in December. I was presented with a new survey engine at work and asked to see if I could write components for it. Sounds good to me - I like a challenge. The complication was that the components needed to be written in ReactJS, a JavaScript library I’d heard of but never used. Another challenge! I’ve spent three months with it now and I’m mighty impressed. Moving across from jQuery was a big shock because I had to switch from ‘imperative’ to ‘declarative’ programming. (Don’t ask; just do a search on Google and see the arguments kick off.) Some considerable brain rewiring was required, but I don’t mind a bit of cerebral rewiring now and then. (If only there weren’t so many short circuits.)
Learning React meant learning some Node as well, but I like that even more. Fancy a local development environment where changes are instantly visible in the browser? Er, yes please. Given I was learning everything it was great to get instant feedback (‘you did this wrong’ etc.).
And with a component ready to go, I started thinking: could I do something like this for my website? That sounds like a task for part 2…
