Learning Redux

@grizhlieCodes Thank you so much! I appreciated the input :) I definitely have a weakness in the accessibility department, so everything there is very helpful! Yep you do have a point, I think that's just a simple mistake I made really early on, and got distracted by the design and shiny things, and never went back. My mistake! But I was under the impression header/footer can be used in any context? For example a sidebar can have its own header/footer, screen readers don't need them to be in specifically only in body etc. As I say, syntax and structure is a part I am still looking to improve on.

As for the height, nope, no reason for a set height, it just worked so ran with it haha, everything stayed the same until mobile, so saw no reason to mess with it :)

Regarding the carousel, nope I used a library for the carousel, and was a choice to make it not loop. I could easily add the option to make it loop in the options. The main focus of this little project was to focus on learning global state, how to toggle, access, read state and the like. So I did not want to get bogged down with a carousel haha, I hope that makes sense. I think if I were to build my own carousel, I would try to isolate it to another project, so I could quickly reference it in future :)

Yea! It took a while to get my head around actions and reducers, and "decentralising" the data.

Again, thanks for the time you put into looking into this. Appreciate it.

@BenjaDotMin So, header and footer can indeed be used anywhere else. A section can have them, a div even I suppose.

But ultimately whilst that's true semantically I think that this is more of a body header than a main as it doesn't really have anything to do with the main. It would also probably be on other pages if this were a real fully-blown website with multiple pages. That was a nitpick to be honest but overall a normal website would have header -> main -> footer. I think :P

I'm on the sidelines when it comes to libraries. A part of me sees the benefit and the time saved. But on the other hand when you build some stuff you learn things you didn't even know you could learn. The other day I essentially wrote my own version of 'scrollHeight' as the normal scroll height was ignoring a bunch of CSS information that I needed to account for.

Or when I did the invoice app on FEM, I built my own date-picker (that was a f***** mission when I did it the first time). I can't express the amount of lessons in that.

Then again, if I used a library for these things I would have learned how to use that library which could be argued to be a tool also. It's all useful and interesting in the end, hard to pick lol.

How are you finding react? And if you give Svelte a whirl, let me know if anything. I've spent the better part of 2021 with it, might be able to help. React not so much 😅

@grizhlieCodes Right ok I am with you! Sounds like I need to get the fundamentals down for that stuff, instead of diving head first into redux haha.

Yea I know exactly what you mean about libraries. I was told that if I was to join a web dev agency or something, they would not want me spending days hand rolling a carousel or something similar from scratch, due to tight deadlines. They would prefer if it took 20mins instead, using a library haha. Plus it has the benefit of it being "Battle tested" across all browsers, and tested by many contributors. So you can just focus on what you need to do.

But on the other hand when it comes to personal growth, I absolutely agree with you, get stuck in and figure out what's happening behind the scenes, and you learn a ton of transferable skills! So yea projects such as this, would benefit me writing my own carousel, but I really wanted to zero in on the Redux stuff :)

Reliance on libraries is a BAD idea, but I think if you already understand what's happening under the hood, I think its fine and saves you a ton of testing across mobile devices.

I'm loving react, its my go-to framework at the moment! It just makes so much sense syntactically. Not tried Svelte, but I heard great things and its up and coming. its deffo on the list, so thank you, I may hold you to that!

I have heard Vue is very approachable, especially when it comes to state management. So for my next project I will learn Vue, and try to get a handle on Vuex over the weekend. After that, its Next and Nuxt, then probably Svelte!

@BenjaDotMin I think that's similar to my stance on libraries. I hate bootstrap for example but have no problem using it, if I wanted to, mostly because I covered CSS in great depth and wouldn't struggle debugging anything. But generally I avoid recommending it because people usually look for shortcuts and then become lost. Usually.

As far frameworks - I'm interested in anything that saves time and simplifies things, why Svelte/Sveltekit are such interesting tools so far. A super interesting video by the creator of Svelte if you're interested.

Vue looks very similar to Svelte btw. It's easier in most aspects to pick up too. Oh yeah, Vercel (company that created Next.js) recently hired Rich Harris to work full time on Sveltekit - which signals to me that in some time there will be the 'Big 4' frameworks, not 3. The guy was creating it part time along with the growing community whilst working at the NYT as a 'graphics' guy for the web 🙃. Good luck on the learning curve, looks like you've got your work cut out for you hehe.

@grizhlieCodes Yea I am really not a fan of Bootstrap. Although it does speed things up a lot (especially mobile), it always feels so... off the shelf and similar to other sites. Also you don't actually learn anything (again especially mobile), except very specific css classes that are specific only to bootstrap. So its kinda limiting to any learning. But yea, if you need a site out in a week, maybe consider bootstrap haha. I know you can customise it, but I ended up fighting the bootstrap classes, as they were way too opinionated, and it just took longer. May as well just write it yourself. But that's my opinion, and Bootstrap definitely has its place.

Ah cool that's good to know! That sounds similar to Evan Wu, he left Angular to create Vue. So you may be right about another one coming! Not tried Angular either, but I don't think I am a fan of it already.

Thanks! its a long road, its just finding the free time first, isn't it!

@BenjaDotMin Tried tailwind? V3.0 just came out, good summary video on it, fixed most issues I had with it within a year of using it the first time.

Pretty insane to think that these are all free tools we can just use. Lucky us :)

Speeds up everything nicely, hard to argue with that. I think it works well for components where you don't need too much HTML so the classes don't make the file MASSIVE and messy. Otherwise SCSS is still 'my bae'.

@grizhlieCodes Yep I gave that a bash too, my first attempt at learning it was on this site, doing the [Profile card component]https://www.frontendmentor.io/solutions/trying-out-tailwind-XGN57ajil). I really like the concept of "Never having to switch to a css file", which did speed things up. However I spent more time in the documentation and lost time haha. But I guess that would get better over time. But again similar to Bootstrap, I had to spend time fighting the config file when design gets slightly complex. Forever adding specific properties or values, rather than just writing it the simple scss way. Although I get its about re-use, and frontloading the work to save time later. As for the messy classes in html, I found you could use @apply to add several Tailwind classes to a single css class in html, which was great for re-use and neatness!

Yep, SCSS is still king, I really need to get into using functions and math based colors/padding/font sizes etc in there. I really feel I haven't scratched the service, as its pretty much like JS in a few ways!

@carlwicker Thank for the insight Carl, you are definitely right. I will carry those forward with me!

@mrmotofoto Very kind words, thank you very much :) And I bet! That would take me months haha. Sounds like you got a lot out of it though!