Background Story

Okay, so this is what happened. I’m two days away from my last day at my first company. My family is a wretch of sorts (lots of sorts, so much actual sorting may help a little here). And the only things that has kept me sane all these years of self doubt and family problems, is writing. I used to write a lot before, but then some things happened which gave rise to secrecy, so I’d have to think twice to ensure that a particular blogpost wouldn’t be seen by some people. They did multiple times, secrecy/privacy is a myth. Every time I started writing somewhere else, I’d have this innate desire to share stuff, even when I’d have written something for myself. And I’ve been busted for things, some wrong some right, well what’s the difference anyway. Dependent on opinions, time and emotions, it’s alright. Or eventually will be, or intermittently, well who knows, and who am I kidding, so let’s talk (to myself mostly)

The Promise

I made, a friend of a friend, a promise, that I’ll make her a good portfolio site. She’s a freelance graphics designer, so the plan was, that she’ll design, and I’ll convert that into good old HTML5, CSS3, Javascript magic. Then I got into hibernation of depression, started staying only with myself more, started watching movies like crazy, like always have in the college. If my father read this he’d probably be upset but not so much. He doesn’t really express things. I sometimes fear I’ve that same very behaviors that’s why I do not have many friends. I don’t want to be an unexpressive guy. Anyway. So I didn’t finish the site, left very early.

Now

But right now, since I’ve nothing better to do and I’m finally feeling actually free after 16 years of non sense education, I thought I could start over, it’s a new years! I messaged her, she’s in, she’s designing the mock, and I’m exploring react starter kits, I’ve seen create-react-app, I dug really deep into next.js, BUT, since I realized between that her mock screens will take some time, I realized that I should read more code, since I was beginning to have problems writing code. You can’t know all the capabilities of a library, if you haven’t seen it in action before, and make something using it later. So first step first, I cloned react hacker news clone, made by Addy Osmani and some other folks, on top of nwb (I wonder what it stands for). I’ve liked nwb so fear, because its the least opinionated. I liked next.js for how less work a person needs to do, and serve side rendering pops right outta the box! But it’s current stable version’s use of threepointone’s glamor css in js implementation was throwing tricks with me. So for example I’d want to include css in js as it is from other libraries like react-grid-layout, but I wouldn’t be able to do so. I read Arunoda’s comment on an issue that you could use babel something to make it work, but it didn’t feel right.

I’ve decided to start blogging about how the app works, how the server side rendering is being done, and everything. The reason I’m doing this is because writing is like a bait for me, even when I know it’s a bait! It’s that great! It’s like chocolate, water, or ice cream, it makes me want to stop the movie in between, and want to write! Since I was realizing I wouldn’t be persistent in staying on course this year, primarily because I have not made habits out of staying persistent, I decided it would be the best for me (and possibly for my blog), to start writing minute details about the code from as close as possible. Perhaps after I’ve done reverse understanding (read engineering) this app, I’ll make a screencast about it, just for fun! I can learn basic video editing along the way. This is exciting!

This is going to be a series, titled

Breaking Down React Hacker News App - Part ${number}

And there are prospects! After I’ve done this, I’ll take the least effort needing todo from the TODO.md and work on it! Yay!