It's Gonna Be May

I made it a goal to write a blog post each month in 2024, starting in April. This is an extension of my goal to improve my technical communication, as outlined in my "How I'm Improving My Dev Skills" blog post. For May's blog post, I'm going to report some of the things I did in April, mainly because I had a hard time finding time to write a blog post that required more research and learning 😅.

Spearheading Framer Motion Questions on Stack Overflow

I like to look at Stack Overflow when I have some down time (Yes, I am crazy). Lately I've been looking at a lot of questions related to Framer Motion, an animation library for React. I've seen some amazing things made with Framer, so I'm trying to sharpen my skills with it so I can join the fun in making those sweet animations. Here are my top 3 questions from last month that I enjoyed looking into:

1. How to make a page transition with Framer Motion and Next.js 14?
   • This is a question I saw several months ago, but I revisited this past week and saw that someone had also answered with a good simple solution to the issue, but it lacked the exit animation on each route change. It was a fun challenge to look into. If you want page transitions, check out my answer to the question.
2. Animating clip-path with useTransform and useMotionTemplate
   • This was a question that introduced a use case for the useMotionTemplate hook from Framer. This was a first time use case for me, but it was fun to see how it could be used to elevate the user experience.
3. Stagger animation with useInView
   • This question was asking for a way to trigger a stagger animation for some elements when one of the elements was in the viewport. This was accomplished with Framer's useInView hook that, like the name suggests, returns a boolean depending on if the element tied to the ref it's given is in the viewport.

One Hour of Dev Work Every Day

Aside from answering stack overflow questions, I've added one hour blocks of each workday to my calendar that are dedicated to doing some sort of coding. I have several little projects I've started over the years and have a difficult time working on those old projects. Each day is dedicated to a different project, so my projects have a little less dust on them than they would have if I kept following my old approach.

Dedicating one hour blocks to my projects has helped me get past the invisible barrier I tend to hit when I want to code, but not sure what I want to code or if I have the ability to get into a good flow. It has helped it feel less like the stars needed to align for me to work on projects and more like a ticket to an EDM festival.

I may write a blog post about these projects as they grow, but for now, if you are interesting in what they are:

• A simple timer: I'm adding it as a tool on this site.
• Monkeyspout: a customizable, rapid-fire question widget. I made it to help me talk to people (I suck at holding conversations).
• My sister-in-law's massage therapy website. It's mostly static content with some links to a booking service she has setup.
• A web based marketing tool that connects to ad channels to grab marketing data and display it in nice charts and graphs.
• My portfolio, ricohancock.com. I'm trying to make it a good representation of me as a developer. As many of you readers probably feel the same, I don't like talking about myself and have a hard time coming up with things to say.

Conclusion

There you have it. That's the dev related stuff that has consumed my April. Besides what I've already told you, I bought a Majesty Palm plant, put up shelves in my home office, and ate several Chipotle burritos while soaking up some spring sun.

Don't forget to Love All, Serve All.

Thanks for reading, here is your cookie: 🍪.