mohamed3on/fast-app

Fast movies

Notes

• The app is deployed here using Netlify.

• I used material-ui as a style library, as I didn't want to waste time recreating basic components (button, checkbox, dialog) from scratch, especially if I wanted to do a good job of it (especially accessibility wise).

Now for some questions

What work took the up majority of your time? Most difficult parts?

• figuring out where the state of the application should live
• figuring out the checkout process, should it be a pop up? a different page?
• Tinkering with the styling & layout of the app until it looks good

Did you learn anything new while completing this assignment?

• Yes! how to run some code as a hook on component update after the initial mount (so like componentDidUpdate). That's by using a ref that's initially null, and then updating it after the first time the hook runs.

  const App = props => {
  const didMountRef = useRef(null)
  useEffect(() => {
    if (didMountRef.current) {
      doStuff()
    } else didMountRef.current = true
  }
  }

What did you not have time to add? How could you improve the app further with more time?

• reflect the search query in the URL, you should be able to use load some search results right away by landing at the right URL.

• Keep the API key as an environment variable, not in the code.

• Use a proper state management approach as the app grows. Even React Context would do (didn't find it justifiable in a small app)

• Make the app more delightful to use. More animations and colors (need a designer's help for that).

• Add Server side rendering. This is a good use case for it, as the content of the page is not user-dependent (the movie results are the same for everyone, so we can just load them on the server).

• Make the search experience smoother by running the search automatically on input change instead of when the user clicks "search". With debouncing to avoid making it jittery.

• Tests. Especially for the checkout functionality. I'd add some Cypress tests for that.