Whilst looking around for my next Angular project I came across this superb tutorial by CodeExplained which described building a rather snazzy JavaScript To Do app. After watching the video and building the example I decided to port it to Angular to see what I could learn.

I didn’t expect to enjoy the process quite as much as I did. Looking back at the commit history of the GitHub repo I can see with some satisfaction the application taking shape. Beginning with vanilla JavaScript and refactoring into Typescript.

As well as being fun I have also learnt a lot. I made extensive use of developer tools within Chrome to get a better understanding of the application when it ran. VS Code made refactoring Typescript effortless and coupled with Git, I could experiment to see what worked and what didn’t. I discovered Google’s JavaScript style guide and used it for the layout of the methods. There is still work to be done, I think some of the functionality could be moved to other classes or components and there are still one or two any datatypes in use but it’s been blast getting this far.

Porting “something” to a language that you are learning will make you a better developer because it will introduce you to challenges that you may not encounter when building greenfield applications.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to CodeExplained.