Alright, let’s talk about this little project I did, I called it “Big Bear Gym.” It’s nothing too fancy, just a bit of fun I had messing around with some stuff.
First off, I started by picturing what I wanted. A simple web app, basically. Think of it as a place where you could see different workout routines. Maybe even track your progress, who knows? Anyway, I kicked things off by sketching some really rough layouts on a piece of paper. Stick figures and boxes, the whole deal.
Then, I dove into the coding part. Since I’m most comfortable with it, I used React for the front end. I just like how it works. For the backend, I decided to use * with Express. It’s quick to set up, and honestly, I just wanted to get something up and running without too much fuss. I also grabbed MongoDB for the database. Figured it’d be easy enough to store workout routines and user data.
Next up, I started building out the basic components. Stuff like the navigation bar, the workout list, and the individual workout details pages. It was mostly copy-pasting boilerplate code and tweaking things until they looked halfway decent. I wasn’t going for perfect, just functional. I spent a good chunk of time wrestling with CSS, trying to make it not look completely terrible.
After the basic structure was in place, I started plugging in the backend. I created some API endpoints to fetch workout data from the database, add new workouts, and update existing ones. I used Axios on the frontend to make requests to these endpoints. There were a few headaches with CORS errors and authentication, but nothing I couldn’t Google my way out of.
I then started adding some dummy data to the MongoDB database. I just made up a few workout routines with some basic exercises. I spent a while testing each routine worked when displayed by the API calls, making sure the data displayed correctly in the frontend. I made a few more dummy sets as well, just to give it a fuller feel.
Alright, so now it was kind of working, I decided to add some more spice. Like, a way for users to save their favorite routines. I added another API endpoint to handle this, and then updated the front end to allow users to “favorite” a routine. This required a bit of messing around with user authentication. I used JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for that. Seemed like the easiest option.
Once I had user authentication and saving data done, I tried deploying it to Heroku. Got tripped up for a while due to some silly config issue, but eventually got it all working online.
In the end, “Big Bear Gym” isn’t anything revolutionary. It’s just a simple web app that lets you browse workout routines and save your favorites. But it was a fun little project to work on, and I learned a few things along the way. Plus, it gave me a good excuse to procrastinate on other stuff.
