I've been a designer for about ten years. On the web jobs I did a lot of the front end too. The markup, the styling, the WordPress stuff. But I never really built an app. Like a real one, from scratch, in a framework. So this summer I finally sat down and did it.
I took Scrimba's React course. Bob Zroll teaches it and he's really good. You're actually writing code the whole time instead of just watching someone do it. By the end I had two little games, so I put them online.
The first one is Tenzies. You roll dice, freeze the ones you want to keep, and try to get all ten to match. Pretty simple game. But it's where state finally clicked for me. Each die remembers if it's frozen, the board updates as you play, and the app knows the second you win.
The second is Assembly Endgame. You guess a word one letter at a time, and every time you're wrong it kills a programming language. This one was more about the logic. Showing the right letters, figuring out the win and the loss, a little confetti when you actually get it.
What surprised me was how much of it already felt familiar. Building with components is kind of like thinking in a design system. Small reusable pieces with rules. The new part for me was the logic. I'm used to designing what a screen looks like. This was about making it actually do something.
I'm not putting these in my portfolio. They're just course projects and that's fine. But they're what showed me I could actually do this. That's all I really wanted from them.
Now I want to build something real.