What and why
Nihongo Stats is an Open Source webapp I built while learning Japanese. Learning a second language is a long process, and it is difficult to see your progress. I wanted a way to see some progress… I use various language learning apps, that happen to provide APIs. So the programmer in my thought
I could use this data to visualize my progress
So I built a React app that fetches and displays graphs of various metrics.
Tech Stack
- React
- Vite
- TanStack Query (aka React Query)
- React Chart
- Nginx
- Cloud Run (Google Cloud Platform)
- GitHub Actions
Why I picked these
React/JSX is my preferred why to write UIs. I started this project with “Create React App” but I migrated to Vite because the build/dev speed is so much better. I considered NextJS but currently, it does not offer much due to the API rate limiting forcing the data fetching to be done client side.
I use Cloud Run because, at the time GCP was what I was most familiar with. Cloud Run allows me to simply deploy a container and not worry about scaling. If I were to re-do this project, I would consider using Vercel due to its great CI/CD.
Lessons Learned
Typescript
My biggest lesson learned during this project was that Typescript is basically a requirement in 2023. I started this project in Javascript because I thought
This will be a simple project and I’ll be done quicker with Javascript since I won’t have to worry about types.
I couldn’t have been more wrong…
This project does a lot of data mapping and the lack of types quickly made the code a mess. So many bugs were due to a property not existing or being named slightly differently (ie. reviewDate vs reviewTimestamp).
Adding Typescript to this project fixed many of those types of bugs.
In my opinion, there are very few scenarios/projects where not using Typescript is the better choice.
Caching is hard
Due to the rate-limiting restrictions on Wanikani’s API, caching is data is very important for this app. When I started, this project I naively added my own cache… 🤦♂️
Caching seems simple on the surface but quickly becomes very complex. I have moved my caching from a custom solution to using the browsers’ built-in cache and leveraging libraries like Tanstack Query.