DEV Community: Jaime Panaia-Rodi

Project Ideas

Jaime Panaia-Rodi — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:35:24 +0000

Munchkin Loot Letter game
"Guess that Song" game using Spotify API to play 30 seconds of a random song (maybe selected from a playlist of choice). The player has to guess the title and/or artist before time runs out.
Use the Unsplash API to do a free image search
Summer Kindess App for recording random acts of kindness achieved throughout the summer

Object Destructuring

Jaime Panaia-Rodi — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 15:04:09 +0000

While learning how to write forms in React I learned about an interesting syntax in JavaScript called destructuring. It can be used on arrays as well as objects to quickly extract elements. Here's an example:

const hero = {
   name: 'Wonder Woman',
   realName: 'Diana Prince'
};

const { name, realName } = hero;
name;     // => 'Wonder Woman',
realName; // => 'Diana Prince'

This is so cool. Instead of having to create variables for each element inside the object like this:

const name = hero.name
const realName = hero.realName

You can simply grab any element after writing one line of code:

const {prop1, prop2, ...} = object

More details here from a very smart human.

REACTivating

Jaime Panaia-Rodi — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 15:20:55 +0000

I took an in-person React class with a few co-workers back in 2017. It was winter, the classroom was poorly insulated, and I was a few months pregnant so I was fighting through some distracting abdominal pains. My JavaScript skills were lacking so lots of it didn't sink in. For my final project I attempted to build a game (lofty goal!): Munchkin Loot Letter. It's a very simple card game but when I tried to translate it into code I became lost in all the logic! Needless to say, the app was a flop and never really got off the ground. I tend to love (and get caught up in) styling but when it comes to making things function I get frustrated and give up.

My goal after completing Scrimba's Learn React for Free and The React Bootcamp courses is to actually build this game. I want to impress myself and my wife who is a fellow Munchkin Loot Letter aficionado!

I'm about halfway through the free React course and I'm really enjoying it. I've got a bug in my To Do List App but I'm moving on and hoping I can come back to it later!

Next day update: I fixed the bug! It was a one character error. I was returning "todo" instead of "todos!" Ahhhh! So relieved to have figured it out.

Re-schooling with Scrimba

Jaime Panaia-Rodi — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 14:32:37 +0000

In my past life I worked as a front-end web developer holding many jobs in a variety of industries (media, non-profit, grassroots, start-up tech). I even taught Ruby on Rails (including HTML & CSS) to adult beginners in my favorite gig. Now, after a 4 year break to raise a small human, I scoured the internet for online web design and development courses that would bring me up to speed.

Right away Scrimba captured my attention as a great starting point for brushing up on skills. Not only do they have a ton of excellent courses (and plenty free ones), their unique video format (they call them "scrims") allows interaction with the screen so you can program right along with the instructor, copy/paste and run their actual code, and the resolution is crystal clear - a welcome change from squinting at YouTube videos and trying to quickly type out the code.

So far I've taken 2 courses: Build a Color Tool in Vanilla JavaScript (which scratched my design itch) and Learn Javascript for Free (which was great for basic DOM manipulation). Both used the same teaching style: demonstrating the code or concept, then allowing the student to try it out. For the practice exercises I coded right in the screencast but for the larger projects I coded in my own editor (Brackets at the moment) so I could more easily debug and own a copy of the code.

Here are some of the projects I built:

I also built a Leads Tracker Chrome Extension which was interesting and super fun. I can't wait to create my own Chrome Extensions in the future!

Scrimba is my new favorite thing to talk incessantly about (apologies to my wife) because it's not only a place to learn it's also a vibrant community. I've joined Scrimba Discord server and connected with students of all ages all over the world! There are channels like: announcements, weekly challenges, help channels, study buddies, i-built-this, i-got-hired, career chat, and my favorites for accountability: today-i-will and today-i-did.

Next I (re-)dive into the world of React and brush up my single page application chops! Stay tuned...