Ways To Find New Ideas And Make It Happen — As a Developer
By: Raihan Iyai
Tags: Web Development, Ideas To Execution, Reactjs

Once I finished my probation period, I was challenged by my engineer manager to migrate the Internal Web of Tokopedia web page using React JS. As a backend engineer, I’ve never touch a front-end framework such as ReactJS, and that’s why I accepted the challenge to try something new. Thanks to my engineer manager, Rony Herdiyanto, to give me this opportunity so I can explore new things.

After a month of learning a new framework and implement it on the new Internal Tools, I decided to make my own personal website based on what I’ve learned so far. If you want to sneak a peek at my work, you can visit it through raihaniyai.com, I remake the Instagram Profile page as my portfolio with stories and projects.

In this article, I want to share what I’ve learned and how I earn my personal web inspiration. If you’re a new learner or want to build an application, this Medium article is I made for you. For your note, I will not explain technically what you should do if you want to build apps, but I will give you some resources and some quick tips that would be handy if you want to build apps as a new learner.

Start Learning

The first step is always the hardest, in this step we might think ‘Where should I start?’ ‘Am I too late for this?’ ‘What if I’m not into it?’ or the other thoughts, you named it. And I always motivated by one of Tokopedia’s slogans; #MulaiAjaDulu. Yea, just go for it! Don’t hesitate to take the first step. You can start by Googling ‘How to ….. ?’ to start your projects, then do the rest.

In everything we do, we should know the main reason once we start doing something, keep doing something, or end doing something.

Also in starting to learn a new framework, make sure we know what is our ‘why’. For me, I learn a framework (in this case React JS) because I need to meet the team goals, and actually, I’ve been meaning to build my own personal website to share my personal branding since 2018, but I don’t have enough resources to build it. Then this opportunity comes to me, so I won’t miss it. Anyway, have you already find your ‘why’ to build an app?

After I know my main reason, then I start learning React JS by following these steps:

Learning Setup — React JS Setup

In this step, I install the requirements of React JS (npm, create-react-app, and folder structure).

Deep Dive Into the Framework — Learn about the Components and Props

Since React JS has a component-based architecture concept, we should learn more about what is components and how it works. In an easy way, the component is like a container and the prop is like a variable that we can pass to other components.

Find Out How to Build It — Learn React Hooks

This is the most important thing we should learn in React JS nowadays. In the updated React JS version, we can use the state and lifecycle method without creating any class.

Bonus: Find supporting libraries As a backend engineer, I found difficulties in creating a component design since I don’t have many resources to design things. Fortunately, there are so many developers that provide libraries to create basic components such as Buttons, Tables, Cards, and any other components. In our development on Tokopedia Internal Tools, we use ant design library to ease our development.

You can learn those things on the internet, each of us might have a preferred method for learning. For me, the best way to learn something new is to watch some videos, look for examples, then practice it. After I have practiced some tutorials, then finally I make my ideas happen.