As someone who loves React, there’s often the question of whether to add Redux to your React application. There are a lot of reasons to include Redux so I’d like to go over what Redux does and why you might want to use it.
I was recently taking a look at my schedule and making sure to adjust any areas that could use some work. I’m always trying to improve myself, make sure I’m being as productive as I can be, and benchmark myself for optimization. Programming is different than scheduling other activities though, and while I knew this, I find it really well articulated in the concept of the Maker’s schedule vs. the Manager’s schedule. Someone recently sent me an article on the idea, and it’s so true!
I was recently working on a React project for a really awesome company, and there were a lot of fun features in the project that made me want to discuss it. The project itself was a wine list that pulled in data from an API, and I had to create a “select year” feature that would have a drop-down list of all the wine years available. When a year was selected from the list, it showed the wines available from that year.
“Paperclip is deprecated?” I groaned. I was right in the middle of working on my photo uploading application, Eventure Photos, that’s equipped with a Rails API back-end, Redux middleware, and a React / JavaScript frontend. (See my post about its overview here.) I was planning on using the Paperclip gem that was previously in vogue for my photo uploading, but with its deprecation and replacement by Active Storage, it made much more sense to just learn Active Storage.
After a lot of studying and trial and error, I’ve created a really cool application that I’m proud of called Eventure Photos. It’s a Rails API backend with Redux middleware and a React/JS frontend. Eventure Photos allows everyone at an event, whether it’s a meeting or a wedding, to share their photos in real time. With so many of my friends and colleagues wanting to share their event photos as they happen, this application was the perfect solution. I definitely had to expand my knowledge a lot to finish this project, but it’s really made me fall in love with these technologies.