Hack Reactor Week 3 Recap

This week is React week! We started the week off with an introduction to React and learned how to build a mini app that searches for video using YouTube API and updates the video player as the user changes the search input. This was a very interesting project but also a leap from previous concepts since we have not had experience with React up until now. I had to consult Help Desk multiple times and I really appreciate the help that the staff provided to guide me through the sprint. The next sprint we had was converting our React app to a React-Redux app. It was not a very tough sprint, however, it seemed like Redux created more work and was more complicated to configure. Redux and React have different structures with how they want to handle the application state and there are both pros and cons to each of the frameworks. We wrapped the week up with learning about Node. Although conceptually it was not hard sprint, it was challenging to start off with the lack of familiarity with Node documentation and syntax. We created a server for our chatterbox client that we created last week for our AJAX, jQuery sprint. It was very fulfilling able to see how the frontend ties in with the server to provide an interactive application that one might use on a daily basis.