I have always preferred to work on the back end. It seems more peaceful there. The front end is all colors, moving stuff, and clicks!! Why should I care about clicks… I respond to requests no clickity click click demands! I am fine seeing JSON shoved on the screen, I will parse it visually, personally. I don’t need fancy filters, sorters and interfaces for data.

This opinion puts me most certainly in the minority, so as every good developer does, I forced myself to do something that made me uncomfortable, make a front end. A little background, the project is a way for me to organize my interviews. I needed a place to hold the questions, let me run through them, add notes, and rate the candidate etc.

The api was written with hapijs, my new personal favorite node framework. I was waffling about what to choose for the client side of things. I have already built a few things with Angular 1.5 so I was contemplating Angular 2, but that would go against the reason I am doing this in the first place. I mean if I am going to go out of my comfort zone, it might as well be way out. I could do it in pure vanilla js, but again I am quite familiar with that.. Come on John! Think… think… A-ha! React. I hear about it constantly. It seems to solve some issues with rendering speeds. It has cool terms like ShadowDOM and JSX that remind me of hackers and superbikes in a cyberpunk movie.

“ShadowDOM leapt, turning mid-air. Using a neural link to control JSX superbike, it started just before her ass slammed into the seat and exploded violently forward…”

I am a few days in now. I have the basic CRUD working, and you know what? I don’t hate it! I like the way react apps come together. Nice and modular, with plenty of opportunity to build reusable components, really fun stuff. So I guess the lesson learned is to keep yourself confused and uncomfortable. Sounds like fun!