Growth & Development
Before starting at Fitspot, I had set a personal goal for myself to improve my abilities with frontend technologies, especially React, and gain a better understanding of the development process, from ideation to launch. Since this was a relatively young company, I got to take on multiple projects and learned to adapt quickly in a fast-paced environment. Below are a few of the projects I worked on.
UI Enhancements
Replaced the traditional top navigation for the entire site with a responsive and easily configurable side navigation component. This component is now used throughout the entire suite of applications.
Upon client request, added a theme picker that allows users to personalize the look of their web portal. This feature was built using Sass mixins for generating the CSS and the browser’s localStorage API to save the user’s theme preference.
New Features
As a way to show little snippets of information in a fun and engaging way, I introduced informational tiles into the core web portal. These tiles display information in the form of images, text, links, and/or videos and utilize CSS animations to smoothly animate through the different content.
In addition to the user-facing side, I built a tile editor into the content management tool. This allows for both managing existing tiles and easily building and deploying new tiles.
Building a New App
I was tasked with taking the existing React Native mobile app and rebuilding it from scratch as a progressive web app (PWA). This allowed the product to be accessible from the desktop as a web app, and installed as a standalone app on mobile.
The rationale behind this project was primarily so that the codebase would no longer be fragmented between React Native and React web which meant faster updates and better integration with the continuous deployment system. Additionally, this was an opportunity to improve both the UX of the app, as well as improve upon the code to reduce its bundle size and increase maintainability.
This was by far my favorite project to work on as it was the most challenging, but also provided a great opportunity to hone my technical and design skills.
Looking Back
My experience at Fitspot was great exposure into the role of a frontend developer. During my time here I had great exposure to the full ideation and creation process, as well as the opportunity to learn and practice new development technologies and concepts. I learned a ton about React, Redux, Webpack, Sass, Git, application security, and much more.
