My Client Paid Me $200 To Learn React

I work as a software engineer at some bank. On the side, I also provide Python tuition services, and occasionally freelance programming services — small websites, web-scraping projects, automation scripts etc. In one such case a while back, a client actually paid me $200 to develop a single-page React application. The catch — I didn’t know React before this assignment!

Me Before The React Assignment

I’ve done a couple of personal projects in VueJS and NuxtJS, 1 side project in Angular but 0 in React.

• I took quite long to figure out how to pass data from a parent component to a child component
• I took an embarrassingly long time to make a proper GET Request
• I probably spent as much time on CSS as the React framework — background images that behave strangely, misaligned tables, extra white boxes that appear for some reason etc.

Me After The React Assignment

• Much more comfortable with React as a framework — I can make a simple site (styled with CSS) relatively quickly now
• 1 more frontend framework I can add to my resume
• 1 more project experience that betters myself as a programmer
• $200 richer