Initially, I was planning on creating a pure React Application, and I don’t exactly remember how (one of my friends/co-workers might have made a comment about it most likely) I ended considering two tools: Gatsby JS and Next JS.

I built a small prototype with both of them (oh the time I’ve spent on this project…) and decided to continue with Gatsby JS.

I don’t want to go super technical in these posts, but I particularly liked how lightweight and flexible Gatsby is.

One of the other reasons behind my decision was a blog post written by Ali Spittel. I was able to take a look at her blog and at the source code that powered it.

I asked Ali for permission to use her blog repository as a base to create my own, and she gleefully gave me her seal of approval.

Typescript

During my time working at Bing, I mostly used C# and a little bit of JavaScript here and there. When I became an instructor at Code Fellows, I transitioned almost entirely to Javascript.

I learned a lot of Javascript during my time at Code Fellows, but for a bigger project, I decided to go with a more statically-typed language. I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about Typescript, so I decided it to explore it a little bit more before completely committing to it. It has a learning curve, but I definitely loved it.

The funny thing is that I’m using Typescript at my current job, so I could use my Cadejo experience during my interviews. Talk about a win win…win 😉

Other Tools

There are a lot of other tools I’m using to code my app, but Gatsby and Typescript are the bigger ones I wanted to focus on for this article. All of these tools had a learning-curve, but I’m feeling much more confident with them and I’m hoping to make rapid progress over the next set of iterations.

In the next post, I want to talk a little bit about how I planned (and how I’m still planning) this project.

PS. It’s been fun to write about my experiences so that future Vladimir can remember how much we worked on this.