First week of Job Search and creating new React Apps

I officially started my job search this week after finishing my career counseling course for Flatiron. I have applied to a few jobs using Linkedin and have reached out to a few potential employers of companies I’d like to work for but have yet to hear back from any of them. Along with that I am still coding and making commits to my github. Currently I am creating a portfolio using react that hopefully will attract future employers. Short of that I am also interested in working freelance and hope to hone my skills so I can be competitive enough to win out some freelancing contracts.

For the coding section of this blog I will start by going over how to create a react app on your own Windows computer. First you should download a good code editor, I personally prefer VS code. Next, we will install React into our operating system, You can follow the instructions here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/javascript/react-on-windows

Once React is installed you should install Nodejs/NPM to your system. Nodejs is what provides the runtime environment to execute JavaScript code outside of your browser. NPM is the default package manager for Nodejs, it is used (along with Nodejs) by React to manage dependencies and runtime. To install the latest version Nodejs and NPM go to the website below and download the one matching your operating system:

https://nodejs.org/en/download

Once installed, in your terminal type the following command to make sure you have properly installed both Nodejs and NPM to your system:

node -v
npm -v

The command prompt should output something like this:

// node -v
v17.3.1

// npm -v
8.3.0

Now that we have those installed, create a new folder for your new React project, then open the command prompt in that folder and type the following:

npx create-react-app project-name

with ‘project-name; obviously being whatever name you want to give to your project.

This will create all the files needed for you to start coding a react app. To make sure everything was correctly generated, in the command prompt (while in your project folder) type:

npm start

then in your browser head over to:

http://localhost:3000

and you should see the following:

Thats it! your new React app is up and running and ready to start coding! In my following blogs I will go over some of the concepts of React and how to get a basic webapp up and running as I create a portfolio to showcase all my projects on.