Dev Log: Week of Nov 6–11, 2016

Originally published on Medium.

Most of this week was centred around ReactJS and its associated libraries. Starting a dev log to keep track of what I’m learning as I go.

• Kicked off a critical new project at work. After the inception phase, the team decided to build it as a single-page app — the front-end interaction is heavy enough to warrant it.
• We used ReactJS on the previous product and the experience was solid, so we went the same route.
• Redux followed quickly as the right tool to manage data flow and state.
• One of the senior devs introduced us to Enzyme, a clean framework for testing React components. Pairing it with chai-enzyme brings Chai assertions into the mix nicely.
• We have a need to pull real-time data from a legacy thick-client system (with a .NET SDK). The team had previously built a POC with SignalR and we’re the first adopters in production. The SignalR JS client is rough — that’s immediate technical debt we need to address.
• While designs are still being laid out, we’re building the first cut with material-ui. It’s a solid React component library for moving fast when you don’t have a designer. I also want to look at grommet in a side project.