It's been a while since I've posted on here since I finished my final project at Flatiron School in July. A lot has happened in the past few months. I had a baby! Revel Joy Deaver was born on September 4th at 9:35pm.
She was a big reason why I haven't done many projects. I took some time away from coding to adjust caring for a newborn and a toddler. I'm glad to say that I am slowly starting back with building side projects to fill up my portfolio and continuing my learning.
My first side project since Flatiron School is a Slack clone. During bootcamp, I used Slack mostly to communicate with my cohort and share resources. This application allows a user to sign up using Google authentication instead of regular email and password. A user then can create a channel and start posting messages in it. It's a very bare-bones with a lot of potential.
I built this Slack clone using React.js for frontend, Firebase for database management, and Context API for state management. Firebase is Google's platform for developing mobile and web applications. It offers many products but for this project I am using the database and hosting. Context allows me to pass data to many different components at different nesting levels. It is a feature built into React. This app uses Context to manage user state. It allows many different components to access user data regardless of parent-child relationships between components.
I really enjoyed this build as it allowed me to work with new technologies like Firebase and Context. Because I learned Ruby on Rails and SQL at Flatiron, it was much easier to learn Firebase because I was able to compare what I knew about backend and database. Firebase makes setting up a database very simple and easy and it also comes built with authentication versus having to build one in Rails. Firebase also allows for hosting so the app is live here. I am excited to create more side projects and continue learning!
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