Accessible Components

Contribution

This was one of the first “complete” projects I was a part of! As one of the four apprentices with Sparkbox at the time, we had lofty goals to build this site. Our design team created the illustrative style, layout, and some of the functionality. In general, I helped create React components, like the code sandbox and dialog, worked heavily in the SCSS partials, especially to implement light and dark modes, and added Jest as our unit test runner.

Our apprentice leads ran this project just as a client project, with scrum ceremonies, a Jira board, and progress demos. I enjoyed our stand-ups and the Jira access because it helped me contextualize my work into the project as whole. There were a few times where we, the apprentices, overwrote each other's work. That was a sign that we had to better communicate our progress and figure out where some of our cards overlapped. I volunteered to lead the final demos (I like to say I was “the driver”) while the four of us presented our work as a story, instead of separate, chunks of work that happened to merge into the same project. This project was a great opportunity for me to learn about web accessibility as well, getting more familiar with accessibility standards and WCAG requirements.

One thing I'm particularly proud of in this project was taking on the Airtable work. I had never worked with databases, and was uncomfortable writing much JavaScript, especially when calling an API. Thankfully, I had lots of help and support from my mentor and project leads. I needed to do several things- write a script to ping our database for a component's data, create tests for that script, and update our current page component to use the returned component data. This work really stretched me and helped me understand how all the bits of a repo work together.