Way back when, Christmas holidays of 2018 to be precise, I built a flashcard app called Flashee because I thought that the flashcards apps out there sucked. I cleaned it up and made it available to everyone in 2020 and wrote a blog post about it. But let’s be real, the app wasn’t very well written.
The code wasn’t all that “clean”—it was a bit of a hot mess. Specifically, everything was in a single file…what was I thinking 😱! In 2023 I decided it was time to sort it out, and now it’s 2025 🤣.
The refactoring was very start stop (mostly stop, e.g. I took a 15 month “break”), so, it took me almost 2 years to finish the job 😅. Although it took a long time, I averaged an hour a day on the 80 days I worked on it; I think that’s pretty respectable for a side project. In terms of benefits, updates are going to be MUCH easier than when everything was in one file 😬.
I originally built Flashee using Vue, but I decided to refactor the app in React. The reason I chose React is that I’d recently finished teaching at a coding bootcamp and wanted to consolidate my React knowledge into a real project. I enjoyed getting into the weeds with React and would definitely use it again for other projects (especially when paired with Vite). That being said, React has undergone all kinds of changes since 2023—sigh—so perhaps I’ll need to take another look at the JavaScript landscape before I take on another project…. or maybe I’ll just get ChatGPT to write it all for me 😆.
If you’re interested in geeking out over how I built Flashee then you can find out more at the Flashee Github repo.