React Project

You’ve spent the last two weeks on a whirlwind tour of React and some of its most popular features and libraries in its ecosystem. Now, you get to do something substantial with it while its fresh in your minds.

Next week, you get a full week to write a compelling front-end application to go into your portfolio. It should be something that you can display to demonstrate the skills that you’ve picked up over the past two weeks. While you do have to use React, the rest is up to you, but we recommend that you use Hooks in your project because those are the latest way that people build things in React and will be most appealing to people that are looking at your project.

Because this is an individual project, you have full freedom (and ultimately responsibility) of being able to get something done. If you want to build the entire fullstack application yourself, that’s great! Just make sure you scope the amount of work into something that you feel is best for your week’s worth of time. Use your newly-found knowledge of how long it took you to build your other project to determine how much you could get done on your own.

If you choose not to build a full-stack project, but just want to spend all of your time on the front-end, consider building a front-end for any of the group projects, it doesn’t have to be your own. Or, you can check out Programmable Web which lists thousands of APIs that you can use in your project.

Now that you have an understanding of how Websockets work, use the socket.io library on your backend to make Websocket development easy.

Moreover, search for third-party React libraries that you can use to help speed your development or give your application a polished look. Here are some suggestions for you to look at as a start:

Those are just starting points. You can look for more by using your favorite search engine and terms like “react libraries”.

Homework

Think about what you’d like to do, poke around Programmable Web, go back and look at all of the group projects, look at the list of projects at the end of this article. Find something that you would like to do. You already have a strong knowledge of how to build a data API. You have the code to hook in authentication using JWTs. You can reuse your models and migrations from earlier projects.

Planning Day

Put together your proposal. In software development, normally, a week of planning can give you about three months of work. So, your day of figuring out what you’d like your app to do should give you a week

Project ideas

Here is that list of project suggestions, again, with their different requirements. Feel free to do one of them, if you think you have time.