Reflection

Reflection

What was the context for this project?

This is a portfolio project to help me find a job. There was a lot of personal interest in learning Next, exploring Vercel's offering, improving my typescript knowledge, and deepening react learnings.

What did you set out to build?

I set out to build a very basic dashboard project, per the next tutorial, but wanted to add more features and pages on my own.

Why was this project challenging and therefore a really good learning experience?

Its the first time I've done a project entirely in typescript. The pre-built UI made it much faster. NextJS is easy enough to get started with but has surprising depth. Very interest framework.

What were some unexpected obstacles?

While they provide a lot of template code, I believe they intentionally don't implement all of the features they set up. Getting the Customers page set up, writing my own types, and starting to work with server actions weren't clear at start but turned out to be pretty easy after I did a bit of reasoning.

What tools did you use to implement this project?

Typescript, NextJS, React, Vercel, @vercel/postgres, Zod, @next-auth, pnpm, clsx, and Tailwind. Heroicons is an excellent resource to quickly get and use icons.