Entrepreneurship, Bubbling Events, and Environment Set-up

No, this isn't a post about how those three items in the title are related. Although, that'd be a sick thing to write about.

Entrepreneurship

I'm really motivated by stories like MongoDB's. The Mongo team didn't set out to build a database system. They set out to build a cloud platform. Along the way, they realized that existing solutions didn't meet their database needs so they created one. Recognizing an opportunity - the kind of opportunity that comes from saying that if I have this problem, other people probably do too - they pivoted, and MongoDB the product was born.

It's a familiar story to those who are interested in the world of startups. And it's a story that makes me think that action can be valuable on its own. You can wait for the perfect idea, or you can agitate for it. That thought motivates me a lot and makes me want to create.

Bubbling Events

Our Front-End Capstone project involves tracking user interactions. We have to track, for example, user clicks on every single element in our DOM. I'm new to React, and in some ways, it first appeared, well, if not daunting, then involved.

Here were some of my early thoughts:

Can you add two 'onClick' handlers to elements/components?

Could we add a tracker method to a clickHandler prototype and pass all events to that clickHandler?

I did some reading on event bubbling in React and learned quite a bit about bubbling in general - bubbling in the DOM. Capturing events, triggering them, and then bubbling them back up the tree. You can read what I read here and here.

Pretty cool. Well apparently that all translates really well to React. It might even be possible to capture all child elements from all the way up at the root 'App' level. I can probably test that pretty easily - maybe using one of our HR React assignments to observe even bubbling behavior and apply those findings to our new project.

Environment Set-up

This morning I began my blog project undertaking. I was hoping to knock out the environment set-up pretty quickly and dig into Mongoose but, predictably, the environment was a big chuck to get my arms around. But it was time well spent. It was also a nice testing-ground for smaller blog posts that I might assign to their own section. Having space for shorter technical (or not) posts like that and then space for deeper-dives or lengthier posts will be helpful and healthy for my approach to this blog. It's tough to crank out a 'quality' post nightly. But I want to keep up the daily contribution schedule and having an outlet with shorter posts kind of gives me permission to do that.