State in Web Dev Explained to a 10Y/O

mosesmbadi — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 16:31:07 +0000

Let's go straight to the point.You are building a website (assuming the 10y/o has already learnt the basics of web development),so you have the header,a few this and that for the landing page,and a footer at the bottom.

Now just above the footer you have a form,with maybe the Name field and the Message field.Now state,simply put is what your user will be looking at before and after a certain activity.For example,when a user scrolls and reaches the form,it's just an empty form with the fields,now that is the 'initial state'...then the user enters some values and clicks the submit button,then you have a red alert that the says the name is invalid,now that's another state.After correcting,the user clicks the submit button and a 'success' message pops up,that's another state.

When developing this,you'll need,well 3 code blocks for the three states,this is why you see the getInitialstate ,setState,this.state getState in that repo you cloned.

I understand that there might be a more broader and technical way to explain this,but after hours of googling to try and understand state in web dev,this is how I wish someone would have explained it to me.

Why using a website builder is 'shooting yourself in the foot'

mosesmbadi — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 14:03:26 +0000

I started learning web development late last year.Becoming a self-taught developer is quite easy contrary to popular opinion,(if you know where to start😉,and what to understand ).In my case I started with reading alot of 'how to get started in web dev' articles from this I slowly noticed a trend,then I made my own syllabus and got started.So,6 months after that started spreading the word among my friends that I develop websites.That's how I got my first 4 gigs.
I built the first 3 website with html and CSS,they were simple blog websites,and JavaScript was a huge pain in the ass to understand 🤦.The forth one I just downloaded a template and customized it.So,my fifth website as a freelancer ,I was dead broke and a client approached me with a small offer.I told myself I will just take the money and build the website on wordpress and it will take me less than an hour (and lesser cups of coffee😂) .Long story short,a week later the website got hacked by some Turkey guy,after restoring,I again ran into another bug,it took ages to load.After that it went down,took me hours googling to find out the issue.All this while the websites I developed from scratch using html,css and js and in some case Django had no issue and were loading at light speed.
Another bad experience with website builders is when I tried wix.You see,for less than Ksh 4,000 ($40) I can host my website with Truehost compared to Wix which will charge you Ksh 2,400 ($24) a month!Woaa!Maybe that's pocket change in your country,but in kenya that's alot of money.
Flexibility is very important when building a website.You need to have total control over your website.It's a huge bummar when you get complaints from website visitors that your website has a bug yet you don't know where to start to fix it.In addition,you competency will be doubted when you tell your client or manager that you can't reduce the image size because the website builder has a min of 500*500pxs.
I learned my lesson.

DEV Community: mosesmbadi

State in Web Dev Explained to a 10Y/O

Why using a website builder is 'shooting yourself in the foot'