Project Time

“I’ve decided to make you my new project” is the line from Wicked I always think of when I talking about working on my project.

I’ve decided one important thing in my development it to work more with third-party APIs, which admittedly I’ve used little of. In fact, I once didn’t get a job because I had such a poor answer as to which third party APIs I’ve utilized. Time to change that!

Medium has been a create resource for finding project inspiration, and I came across a listicle with a perfect and simple idea for a project: a news aggregator. Most news sites offer APIs, so I think this will be great training.

I’ve already begun building with React-Redux, and am unsure about implementing a backend at the moment. At the moment, I could keep it pretty static and have all users able to access different tabs for the top stories. In the future I would like to expand the functionality for users to create an account and personalize the news sources they want; I’ve wanted to explore handling sessions and logins with Javascript, but the concept definitely seems daunting….

I’d also like to be oriented with the design of the project. I’m not marketing myself in interviews as a designer of any sort, but I definitely believe there is a subconscious attraction to projects that are more eye-catching (even if an “uglier” project may be more sophisticated or efficient). I could definitely afford to have a more comfortable footing in CSS and this would be an easy way to do that.