How React JS Changed My Life

Towards the end of 2015, I resigned from my first professional job in Abuja, Nigeria where I started out as a Graphic Designer. I felt the urge to do more with technology, and pursue my goal to become a Software Engineer. Thou I have been doing some development work in the company by building our website and a CRM system in house.

At the time, my tech stack included PHP, HTML, CSS, and JQuery. I frequently used CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento for web design and custom web applications. These tools served their purpose well and still help millions of websites and applications today.

However, it wasn’t until I started working on a side project that later became a startup, that I realised I needed something more. I had been experimenting with Python and Django for monolithic applications, and had try Ember and Angular for single-page web applications.

Initially, I used Vue JS to create the prototype for my side project. I appreciated the excellent documentation and ease of use of Vue JS, as well as the fantastic Vue Material UI framework. However, I realised that my JavaScript skills were quite rusty and decided to dive head-first into React, which actually made me a better JavaScript Developer.

I enrolled in the Udacity React Nanodegree in 2017 and, although it was an expensive course for me at…