This project was built for me in order to improve my css flexbox skills. As a backend software enginner I have always focused on software architecture, data modeling, unit tests, cloud computing and databases. But since I've gone through many situations that were expected from me to deliver a complete solution, including the interface, I've decided that it's time to study my weakest ability, CSS.
The best way to improve the css skils is to code as much as possible css. I decided to get a finished interface and reimplement it was codde without looking at its original implementation.
The choosen interface is the twitter feed interface, as follows:
This topic is dedicated to explain the technologies involved and the architecture/context that they are applied in this project.
- Html5
- CSS3 - Flexbox
- Javascript
- Webpack
- node.js
- Chai - assert library
- Mocha - unit tests
All the structure of the page is built in html5, so it has the semantic tags and all the structure elements and content of the page.
The visualization and the stylization was made throw css3 flexbox. I've got really surprised during the development of this project by the way, the last time that i had coded some css, i was trying to structure my website using things like float and clearfix. Flexbox get shit done easily.
I also implemented some media queries in order to adjust some layout details to look good in all devices possible. But I had some limitations beacause according to the Twitter interface, it was not design using a mobile first methodology.
I had to use some javascript to code the functionality that controls when the floating menu shows itself by the time that the right menu is clicked. As the picture bellow shows:
The bundler used was the Webpack. I've heard of it before but I have never used it, because as I already told you guys... I am not specialied in frontend devolopment. After using it, I realized how important a bundler is in a frontend project. You can basically refer a entrypoint and add some pluggins to build, minize and optimize all you files, from js files to html files.
At the package.json file, there are build script for both the development process and production process.
Development build:
npm run build-development
Production build:
npm run build-production
Since we've coded some functionalities, I decided that it would be a great idea to add some tests in it. Just to guarantee that our code will do as planned. To do that, I used some well known node.js depencies like Mocha, Chain and Sinon.
To run all test you can run the following command from your terminal:
npm run unit-test
In order to bring only one pattern of codification, I added eslint to the project as one of the development dependencies. In that way, we only need to run this simple script to validate all our code:
npm run validate
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