Hello,
Today I continued to build up the Water Me web application. I’ll go over some new practices I’ve learned and some reflections of AI’s involvement on this project.
Hooks and Stuff
Context is great. For example I wanted creating plants to not just be accessible from the home page but directly from the navbar. I also wanted the fetching function to be easily accessible anywhere on the app. So I used React’s createContext and useContext to send and call variables declared outside the current page. In the past I’ve used "Prop Drilling" as it's known, which is a bloated way of passing data through multiple layers of components through props. Context is a much more simple, and efficient solution.
Next I had to deal with dates. I spent quite some time with Supabase trying to get my desired output from the date field. Mainly because, within the plant cards, I want to display the “Last watered day”, and then run some math to determine when it should be watered next. I believe heavy reliance on AI here was my downfall and I’m in desperate need of human refactoring to go back in and simplify some of the bloat.
AI Tools
On the topic of coding with AI, let’s dive into that. Yes, I used a fair bit of vibe coding thus far on this project. It’s kind of baffling actually, these tools are so useful, atleast for these simple non-critical tasks. With the little coding I know, I could use tools like ChatGPT to quickly refactor code, create databases, and give insights on popular ways of solving problems. I had to learn a lot of new concepts quickly, and while practice and deeper dives into these concepts will strengthen them over time, I was still able to get things up and running while gaining a good understanding of what's going on under the hood. What I especially liked, was the LLM's error handling, as well as forethought to, for example, disable a button while a function is running. I believe I will use this tool quite a bit to get this project up and running, then do a pass through later to improve and refactor it's code.
I'm having a great time with this project and learning a lot more than I thought I would. It's nice to face so many new challenges; when I have downtime, I'm excited to have so much I could be researching for this project. I don't want to stray too far away from the portfolio, but I think I can allow myself to work on this for a bit. Thank you for joining me today, I'll see ya tomorrow.