Posted February 28, 2019	► Live Demo View on GitHub
0 Comments	Includes CSS, HTML, JSX, Node.js, React.js

I am fortunate enough to be working for a company that cares about my professional growth. As a Junior Software Engineer at Capital One, I got the wonderful opportunity to learn how to make a website in ReactJS last summer. That website is called Jammming.

Jammming is a React.js website that uses the Spotify API to allow its end user make playlists and add them to his/her/their Spotify account.

To make this website, I took the course titled Build Front-End Web Applications from Scratch from Codecademy, which you have to pay for, because it’s one of their Pro Intensive courses. In this post, I’ll tell you about my experience coding this website instead of telling you how to code this website because I don’t want to spoil too much of the content that may be presented in the course.

Coming from an object-oriented programming background, with experience in languages like C# and Java, learning ReactJS was a bit of a shock to me at first because of the decompositional structure of the source code. You basically have to build the code from the ground up, starting with the smallest element to be displayed and ending at the largest element, which is the web page/site itself.

Naturally, the course taught me most of what I needed to know before starting to code Jammming, which is expected, considering the fact that the website was the capstone project of the course. While I was creating the website, Codecademy was giving some guidance on how to create the project. They were careful not to give too much guidance, though, as that would undermine the importance of Jammming as a capstone project. As I got further into the project, I started getting better at ReactJS and understanding how each element reacts (pun intended) to one another.

The only problem that I had was integrating the Spotify APIs into the code, which took hours of coding, but even more time double, and sometimes, triple-checking my code to make sure it was right because the Spotify.js file has a lot of repetitive code in it.

Other than that, it was a pretty fun project for me to do because it challenged me to rethink how I code and it appealed to one of my interests, which is music. Plus, Spotify is an app that I use almost, if not every day, so being able to participate in bringing my personal and professional lives together through technology is a beautiful thing for me.