Week Summary: Learning & Practising Animation in Web Dev + Promoting Open Source

Akash Joshi -

So the last 2 weeks for me have been really good in learning. I started learning framer-motion, which is a library for adding animations to your components in React. I was introduced to it firstly by Pavan’s article, from which I saw how easy its API was, but the real kicker which pushed me into the motion zone is the Interactive React course by SidKP.

It clicked for me when I realized that through framer-motion, animations now spoke the same (declarative) language as the rest of React. Through props, you control how an animation should occur, and motion takes care of everything else for you. It’s visible in this tweet.

To get more experience in framer-motion, I also used it in 3 projects throughout these 2 weeks.

  1. A Shopping + Chat experience within DelightChat (shown within a demo setting)
  1. A demo for a chatting application. The animations in a chat box always seemed intimidating to me, so it felt good to kill this demon. https://77tri.csb.app/
  1. A blackjack game implemented in React and Typescript. github.com/akash-joshi/bluejack

Apart from this, I made the Youtube video ofc. I managed to get to 91 subscribers somehow. Although I couldn’t reach 100, it’s still fine. I will continue to gain subscribers as I put out more content :)

I also worked somewhat on the marketing of functions-without-borders, creating this cover image:

and sharing it on Reddit and some other communities. I hope to write an article for it on an external source soon which will drive even more eyeballs to it.

And now, coming to the last part of hiring, I’m helping out a few companies in hiring their first frontend engineer, who would also be responsible for leading their teams, kinda like the role I hold at DelightChat. Since I’m best suited at finding out similar candidates to me, and also through my Twitter, LinkedIn and ofcourse this blog, I thought this would be an interesting task I could pick up.

I’m still hiring, so you can reply to this email to reach out ;)

Apart from that, I also made a little progress on trying to mint an NFT, doing some things on OpenAI, and making more progress on CASParser :)