Week 74 (7/1/2026 - 7/7/2026)

      Hi everyone, welcome to my 74th blog! This is the Week 2 post for CST 438 Software Engineering.

  • Summarize what you learned about React this week. In your opinion, what the strengths and weaknesses of React.
    • Summary:
      • While I do use React at work, it is definitely a library that I only gained exposure to through the vehicle of Claude Code to contribute on frontend repositories. Most of my actual hands-on (typing code by hand) experience lies behind the frontend (backend/API, database, architecture, etc). Thus, it was nice to formally spend some time actually getting more familiar with React this week, where I got to understand the different hooks such as useState, useEffect, and useRef, along with a practical exercise with building a React frontend through Lab 3.
    • Strength:
      • I think one of the biggest strengths (and something I actually did not know) was brought up by Prof. Wisneski regarding the fact that React only applys delta (or difference) changes to the DOM (Document Object Model), which can dramatically improve performance depending on how much content on a page is updated.
    • Weakness:
      • I would say the main weakness is that React does have a learning curve of sorts. However, less substantially so than a full frontend framework such as Next.js. That said, React is almost always used in tandem with such a framework, as is the case for my company's production frontend environments.
      • The strength mentioned above technically still falls short if a website is completely rewritten from the ground up, as the delta for such a change would be massive.

    That is all for this week, see you in my Week 75 post!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weeks 41 - 48 (10/26/2025 - 12/19/2025)

     (Click on READ MORE for better formatting)      Hi everyone, welcome to my 41st-48th  blogs!  This is the Week 1-8 post for CST 336 Internet Programming. Similarly to CST 311 Introduction to Computer Networks, while journal entries were not required  for this particular course, I wanted to document the concepts and assignments from each week of class. If you would like to see some of these projects for yourself, this link acts as a homepage to visiting all of the projects described below! https://bevans34.github.io Week 1: HTML and CSS This week's primary focus was on learning/practicing creating a website using H yper T ext M arkup L anguage (HTML) and C ascading S tyle S heets (CSS). Highlights from this week included centering a <div>, which is probably one of the biggest memes to ever come out of web development. Labs: 1 - ePortfolio Site In this lab, I created a site hosted on GitHub Pages that features a homepage, about page,...
Read more

Weeks 65 - 72 (4/27/2026 - 6/21/2026)

          (Click on READ MORE for better formatting)      Hi everyone, welcome to my 65th-72nd  blog!  This is the Week 1-8 post for a bit of an awkward time in my CSUMB CS Online journey, and one that quite frankly happened by chance. It was discovered that I was not required to take CST383 Introduction to Data Science in order to graduate from the program. As a result, I decided to drop the course and instead take the Summer 2026 A term to recharge after a little over a year of near-nonstop grinding in this program.     That being said, the idea of considering an online program for a M.S. in Computer Science has been in the back of my head basically since the beginning of my B.S. in Computer Science here at CSUMB. Since I now have this newfound eight weeks of free time, I believe now is the perfect opportunity to begin preparing my graduate school applications. To be completely honest, there is really only one school I a...
Read more

Week 73 (6/22/2026 - 6/30/2026)

       Hi everyone, welcome to my 73rd  blog!  This is the Week 1 post for CST 438 Software Engineering. What did you expect a course in Software Engineering would cover? After completing week 1, how has your opinion changed? This question actually brings up an interesting nuance. If you had asked me this prior to entering the industry as a software engineer (December 2025), my answer to this question could have been completely different. Since I have already entered the industry, I was genuinely impressed how much the orientation of this class sounded like a pretty accurate rendition of the current status quo in the industry. For example, I appreciated that Prof. Wisneski understands the relevancy of agentic development via tools such as Claude Code, which is something I use at work every single day. To be more specific, I run most of my prompts on Claude Opus 4.8 1M context. Thankfully, my work has me on a Premium seat of Anthropic's Team plan. This is so...
Read more