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Chad R. Stewart
Chad R. Stewart

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#ChadWritesCode End of Period Log Oct 12 - 25 2020: React Context

So for those following along, you might be wondering what happened to last weeks update? Well I had a bit of uncertainty in my life at the time that affected my plans moving forward. Was half expecting to be knee-deep in interview prep but things didn't turn out that way and I'm just really bad at getting back on track after that. This past week I honestly didn't do too much but I felt I should acknowledge it here. Either way, I still wanted to write my log so onto the show!

So first of all, let me talk about the re-learning those algorithms. Like I said, thought I would be starting interview prep and so I decided that getting a head start would be a good idea. I did a little bit of work in this area but I wouldn't say I re-learned these algorithms. The intention was to be able to write them from memory on a whim if I needed to and that just didn't happen. Just felt I should mention that before moving forward.

What I did accomplish was going through the React Scrimba course and covering the topic of Context in React. So in terms of state management in React, I learned to use Redux and I remember a friend implementing Redux in her own project. She ended up writing an article about her experience and how Redux may be overkill for a small project like the one she was working on. After going through this section of the course, I kinda wish I was able to suggest to her to just React's Context API (though to be fair, there's probably a reason why she wanted to use Redux outside of needing state management).

So full disclosure, I don't understand Redux enough to know when need to use it over Context by itself but I definitely like that the same patterns that you use with Redux you can use with Context. As I messed around with it in the tutorial, it felt significantly easier to implement, understand and maintain than Redux. In fact, when I was working, that was something I constantly had a problem with. We had implemented Redux in the React project we had and I always had a hard time making changes to Redux. Looking back at it, honestly we really just had a really large store more than anything else and any of the major complexity really came from the Reducers. I'd have to look at the code again (which I don't have access to) but I'm pretty sure we could achieve the same result without Redux. I also feel it would be easier to maintain but I wonder if that's me being subjective or not.

Regardless, React Context is a welcome addition to my toolkit and makes exploring Redux or other state management tools more interesting cause know I'll have a better idea on how to judge other tools and whether they will provide value to a project I work on. Always a good thing!!

So in the week coming up I'll work on React Hooks, the real meat and potatoes of the course. Until then, see you next time!

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