One of the difficult things (FOR ME) when practicing programming is finding projects to work on. I find it difficult to come up with my own ideas and project.
Luckily, I discovered this website called frontendmentor.io. It's a website that has a collection of front-end challenges with 5 different difficulty levels from the easiest to hardest which are newbie, junior, intermediate, advanced, and guru. I worked on 6 projects from this website before I even started my blog page. I finished 2 newbie projects, 2 junior projects, and 2 intermediate projects. Now, it is time for me to work on a harder project in the advanced category.
There are 12 projects in the advanced category but only 3 of them are free as the rest of them are locked by a paywall, which is fair (they got to make money somehow) and I think the free challenges are pretty interesting enough. Among these 3 projects, just from reading the title, I am leaning towards the third option which is titled “REST Countries API with color theme switcher.”. What caught my attention are the REST API and theme switcher.
Free Challenges from 'ADVANCED' category
Looking at the project brief, I will need to integrate the REST Countries API from https://restcountries.com/ to pull the data and display it like in the designs. I also need to have some filtering options as well as a search bar. Finally, I will need a button to toggle the color scheme of the site (dark and light mode). So it is basically just a site that allows the user to find countries and read some information for that country.
🌎 Frontend Mentor - REST Countries API with color theme switcher
Design preview of REST country api
This design preview is provided in the project resources. What I need to do is just to recreate it using code. This is how most, if not all, of the challenges from Frontend Mentor works.
I have worked with API fetching before from my previous Frontend Mentor project, but I feel I need more practice on them. Working with API is important for developers as it allows them to communicate with other third-party functionalities. I am also excited to try to work on the toggle theme feature because it is something that I have never done before.
What is great about Frontend Mentor is that it allows you to freely choose any framework or library that you want to use. The solutions do not come from the website, but from other developers who submitted their solutions for that challenge. It is interesting to see how different people tackle the challenges differently.
Solutions submitted by other users
For this project, I plan to use React because this is the only library that I am comfortable with, and I still need to get better at it. Similar to my previous project “Borneo Bulletin Bot”, I will try to practice agile development from requirements engineering to documentation. My previous project took me 10 days, but I wasn’t giving 100% on every single day so this time I will challenge myself and finish this challenge in just 3 days. I believe I can do it if I have a solid plan for what I will do for the next 3 days before I start coding.
LETS GET TO WORK
