Link to finished project - https://jchinchilla-spacestagram.netlify.app/
Before this year, I don't think I could have told you anything about Shopify. I had no idea that more than one million businesses use it, or that a million plus stores on Shopify have generated over $300 billion in global economic activity. I was still in the last unit at Lambda School when I saw an open position at a local company and I applied because I thought, 'why not?' The requirements listed didn't seem out of my reach and I knew I had nothing to lose. I thought I would pick it up with no problem, but it ended up being a lot tougher than I thought.
I landed the position and dove head first into Shopify development. I absolutely struggled those first couple of months. I was (and still am) the only developer at the company and it was quite an experience trying to manuever in something I hadn't ever dealt with before. The shopify documentation became my bible. The biggest thing I learned at Lambda was learning how to learn and I am eternally grateful for that; it's what got me through the rough start of my career.
As I started to become more comfortable in Shopify development, I became aware of how great Shopify is. Both to their employees and to customers. I loved the idea of giving everyone the opportunity to not only start their own business, but making the process of having an online storefront so easy! All the resources I came across (shout out to Liam Griffin!) gave me a really good impression of the community Shopify has created. I thought it would be such a great opportunity to be a part of such a great culture.
So of course when I saw this opportunity arise, I knew I had to apply for it!
App was created with React, Redux for state management. Heavily relied on the Internet Archive and used this version of myspace to build my project off of.
The MVP for this project was to fetch data from any of NASA'S API's to display an image along with the title, date, description, etc. We had to be able to also add a 'like' functionality. My styling came from Myspace, where I (along with countless others) got my start in web development. I added state that persisted if user left or refreshed the page, a loading gif in place of the image when waiting for a response from the NASA API, and the ability to comment on the page. Hope you enjoy the small nostalgia trip!