Mistakes I Made Implementing a Complex React Feature

You guessed it! AI drew this and I did not. It’s pretty much what the feature looked like though… kinda

During my day job I am a Frontend Developer at a rapidly moving Chemistry startup. We are growing quickly as a company and there is a need to build out many UIs for internal users.

I had to work on a fairly complex feature recently which was deemed business critical. I worked on the implementation pretty much by myself as the team was spread very thin.

(Just to note, we are using React and Typescript with the Mantine component library on our Frontend. We are using Tanner Query for most of our api calls and a little bit of Redux for handling complex frontend state management).

I wanted to take some time to reflect on the implementation of this feature as I felt it didn’t go quite to plan. All in all I thing the first version of this feature landed ok but it could have definitely gone better. This is my own version of a retrospective and hopefully by sharing this with the community I can help others who may be in similar situations.

Some Context First

I can’t say too much about the feature that I built as this is confidential to the company. What I can say is it was very specific to Chemistry so expert knowledge of Chemistry was needed to help create this feature. I was therefore working closely with chemists. The basic premise of the feature…