I have been working on three small range apps for my portfolio. I created a new page here on my site called “Projects” that is accessible now. They are all followed by youtube tutorials, but I made big changes to youtube app.
First one is MovieLand app. User can search the omdbapi movie database for movies information. I followed along the video tutorial with codebase building. I revised basic react concepts that I had already learned, but is still a good idea for me to go through again. Also it’s a good idea for me to learn the work-flow from an experienced coder, before starting to build apps from scratch myself. In what order things are done, what to prioritize, best practises etc. In that app building tutorial I went through react logic, CSS I just copied from the creator, didn’t work with styling there myself. I also added a favicon.
Second project I followed along is a weather app. User can search for any city around the world for weather. I found that project would be a good starting point to building apps for me, since its simple yet useful and has still building blocks worth revising. The app is doing an api request to OpenWeather api. Same way like the previous app it’s built with React. Styling is again just copied, not working with that in here. Right now I have worked with that project until the react side is ready, the tutorial proceeds teaching how the app can run offline, will look into that in the future.
The last project I started actually before others, but it took longer to complete. It’s a youtube clone app. User can search for a movie from youtube api with my api key. App will display five videos, one ready for playing inside the app and a video list with 4 additional videos. User can click on additional video to be played. It took longer because the tutorial I followed was 3 years old and it used class components and older version of @mui/material. First I built the app following everything from the tutorial just using new @mui/material. It looked pretty bad. So I built everything again from scratch with my own CSS. Finally I delved deeper inside styling with CSS. It took some time, CSS for some reason, being as simple as it is actually, for me is always a bit of a hurdle. But when I take the time and work with it I can make my mind to think in designing eye so to speak. Of course the concepts I’m using are kinda basic, but thats the whole point right now for me with those projects. To make basic concepts as clear as possible, so I can start building something bigger and more complex.
For now I am happy about these projects. I guess based on those I won’t really have a chance at landing a junior web dev position. Maybe an internship, but those are hard to find right now. I would have to build something bigger for people to actually be able to use. I have followed along a few tutorials with bigger projects also so I am looking in that direction. I understand that building projects following tutorials doesn’t really count as experience, but I felt like I had to start somewhere and am happy I did it. I learned about work-flow in developing, what to prioritize first and revised react concepts and CSS. I think that way I even learned more than building everything myself because I literally did the same finger movements as the more experience coder. Still I had to do a lot of research myself and build parts of the code since problems arouse and some styling didn’t work for me.