This week was all about React. We covered off on some basic whiteboarding problems, building a recipes app, creating some website mockups, forms, yarn versus npm, state and useState, React hooks, as well as components and props.

Up until this point, I had heard that React is like a bulldozer compared to the technologies I had been using until now. I didn’t get it. Now I do.

My React-Is-Indeed-A-Bulldozer aha moment went as follows: one of our morning exercises was to build a stoplight, a task I was required to complete in JavaScript as part of my application for General Assembly and something I genuinely struggled with at the time (it also took the better part of an afternoon). And I did it this time around in React, in 15 minutes. Plus I did all of the styling. And it wasn’t that hard? Bizarre. Bulldozer, I got it.

Give my stoplight a go: