After quite a while… Wait, who am I lying to? After a LONG while, I’ve finished Crustecan Warrior and it’s ready for first release. I planned it to take at most 2 months, but it probably took almost 4 months to finish, give or take. I really screwed up my timetable. I had it planned and at some point, I just couldn’t care less about it. During these times, I would go to many different episodes of jumping between Crustecan Warrior project, books/tutorial, and your plain usual demotivation. But those are just excuses. The fact that I mess up my timing remains, and that has been one of my weakness so far. But I finished its first release! That’s all the reason I need to be happy and rejoice. I won’t let anyone take that away from me.
Hmm… What should I put in this post? I can talk about the final stretch to Crustecan Warrior first release. But all I did was applying my design’s layout for desktop. There’s no fun in that since I didn’t tweak the overall design all that much. You can read more as for my reason in my previous post. Well, I guess I can talk about the short story of how I build Crustecan Warrior.
It all started at the edge of Westland where mankind is struggling to defend their last line from the reign of a superior species called “Eltargun” which roams all over the planet Earth…… Wait, wrong story. Okay, Crustecan Warrior. I love watching football (or soccer if you prefer) and I’m a fan of Chelsea FC, one of the best football club in England and the World. When I visited their website, I was intrigued with their ticket checkout system. So I wonder if I could make such app on my own. Yeah, that’s my basic motivation of building this fictional football club app called Crustecan Warrior. But from there on, more ideas popped up as to what I should put into the app. My basic curiosity expanded into these main motivations:
- I want to build a ticket scanner integration with an actual gateway system.
- I want to use payment processor for ticket checkout, namely Stripe.
I always think automated gate system like the ones you will find in public transportation stations or football stadium to be cool. Just scan your ticket and the system will check its validity. Truly a simple and fascinating system for me. Although I still don’t have any idea about this automated gate system and how I can integrate my web app with such system, I think the goal isn’t too far beyond. I’m probably just a few books or people away from having a breakthrough. But for now, I do what I can to build a ticket search system instead. It’s still not fully appropriate for it to work properly with a barcode scanner, but the framework is there. I can easily extend it whenever I want to.
Crustecan Warrior is a personal project. The one that will spearhead my effort to find a developer job. I make it a rule for myself that I must use these personal projects as a way to learn new tools for the sole purpose of always expanding my knowledge. In this project, I added quite a bunch of new ones. They are:
- Material-UI (Now MUI on v5).
- Redux Toolkit (RTK).
- Stripe.
A lot of my focus were put into MUI and RTK as I will likely to use these tools in a lot of occasions from here on. Most of the time were spent reading the documentation of each of these tools. Well, I have the time, so might as well do a little bit of reading. Although I mostly don’t understand the content for these tools as I only use at most 10% of its capabilities, but I’m sure my experience in traversing in their documentation will prove to be useful later as I retrace my knowledge of it.
To conclude, I love all of the tools. MUI makes it easy to build a personal design system. I still need to get used to its CSS-in-JS approach, but I don’t have significant problem about it. Redux Toolkit is also an upgrade for my usual boilerplate of a code when I use plain Redux. I realize how big Redux is. For some application, using Redux might be overkill, and that goes all the same with RTK. Maybe in the future, I will try a lighter one like React-Query if I see it fit. But overall, I love RTK. With the addition of RTK-Query, I can achieve many different data interaction in my app. As for Stripe, I only use its basic payment integration where I will redirect my checkout page to Stripe. It’s easy to integrate, but I envisioned the app to have a local Stripe integration so that I won’t need to redirect it to other page. But again, Stripe makes it very simple to add payment processing ability to your app. “The Middle-man of Internet”, or so they say. And I agree to it.
Lastly, I want to thank God for giving me opportunity to finish this application. He gave me health and an ever-so-healthy old laptop to keep me going. I want to thank you, all of my readers who have been following my stories so far. This is not the end as I will forever have the desire to dive deeper into technology. The next three agendas in my list are fixing my personal website’s contact form, fixing image service of PetTake, and of course, deploying Crustecan Warrior. I will end it for today. Thank you for reading my journal and have a very nice day.
StudioYosepRA 