After a year or so away from my first big React lesson, I decided I wanted to try diving back in again. I took pretty good notes the first time around, and figured I could get back up to speed pretty quick. I was mostly wrong.
It wasn’t React’s fault, though. It was purely a function of a year passing and technology moving forward.
The web hosting where I kept some of my notes got moved to a new server, and something broke the images beyond the common permissions fix. WordPress doesn’t output any helpful debugging info about why it can’t show its images (Devs, you should always output something when you hit internal errors…), so it took me a while to get everything back up and running (URLs and WP subdirs are a bit tricky to sort out, so I cloned the site with Softaculous to a subdir, deleted the original site, cloned the clone back to the original URL, and then deleted the first clone – worked a trick!)
Meanwhile, the new server also meant I had to learn the new DirectAdmin client that replaced the venerable cPanel client. A couple of tickets were needed with my hosting provider to add back settings that had fallen through the cracks during the migration.
Then I had to figure out dumb things – things that the curse of knowledge had made me overlook in my earlier note taking. For example, where I had put the source code. How I started up Visual Studio Code.
The worst though, was getting npm updated and running again. As you can imagine, there were a lot of pretty out of date modules, some so much so that there were very significant problems running the updates. The dependency calculations bogged down into spinning with no progress, and I started getting errors about lock files. I finally had to resort to obliterating my node_modules directory and reinstalling from scratch.
Fortunately, that also took care of the complaints GitHub’s Dependabot, another of the year’s tech introductions, was making about a few of the module versions in my package.json file.
Finally, I’m starting in on a new React course – not because the old one was bad, but because it’s already somewhat out of date with the state of React, for example that some of the lifecycle methods became unsafe, and caused me some problems in my sample app.
It just goes to show in neon lights how very fast software development keeps moving and how you can’t let your attention wander for a minute.