Scorekeeper React

I’m excited to announce that my rewrite of my Scorekeeper app is finally live! Looking at the commit history in the repository, I realized I started the project in earnest well over a year ago, and it sat for a long (long) time. That was, of course, until I attended the free JavaScript for WordPress conference that Zac Gordon put on this week, where I not only learned some new skills I’m ready to start incorporating into my day-to-day work, but I also reaffirmed the knowledge I’d already gained from my infrequent experimentations with React.

If you haven’t used Scorekeeper before, it’s a really basic score tabulation app – enter some people’s names and apply some numbers to the active player and adjust their scores. It’s handy for when you have an internet connection but no pen and paper and need to calculate player scores across a set of various criteria. On iOS, you can add the site to your home page as an app, and clicking on it will trigger a new instance of the app in your browser. I use it all the time, so it was very important to me that the look and feel of the app remained largely the same.

One new feature I added in this rewrite was the ability to reset the current state – basically, starting over and going back to selecting how many players there are. It’s a small detail, but it’s something that will enhance my own personal usage of the app.

As an engineer who works primarily within PHP during the day, it’s taken a while for me to really dig into the React documentation and feel comfortable enough with state and props to build something dynamic in the browser. I really enjoy working in JavaScript, and am hoping that this tiny accomplishment will lead to more opportunities to work with dynamic UIs in the future. I pretty much gave up the need to do any front-end development when I joined WebDevStudios as a back-end engineer couple of years ago, and if I’m being honest, I don’t miss most of it – wrestling with site appearance across a number of browsers and viewports doesn’t excite me. But, I do miss the UX/UI aspects of front-end, and I’m starting to see how better familiarizing myself with frameworks like React can branch into interesting work in the future, both within WordPress (see: Gutenberg) and outside of it.