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React - First Impressions

I've been using React for a personal project, and I am delighted to say that I overall enjoy using it!  While I don't think I'll ever be a strong front end developer (I am much stronger in and really prefer backend development), it is nice to know that I have some front end chops that won't leave me unhappy.

Working with React feels very natural to me.  Creating stateful components that are then composed with props and JSX is very similar to creating stateful objects in java, and the main thing to know is that we are extending a Component, and we are overriding render() and other related methods in order to show components the way we want to show them.  The other lifecycle methods get a little tricky here and there, but everything seems to be well documented, and there is tons of community support for problems.

I haven't quite built something so sophisticated that it needs a separate state management module yet (read: redux).  I don't think I will go that direction next anyway.

Now that I have some practice with front end work, I think my next step will better understand Typescript, which I can hopefully incorporate into React for future work.

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