Launching Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner! 🐔⚡️

App launch

Last week, I launched a random name picker app called Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner! It's a lightweight React app where you can create a list of names or objects, and spin the wheel to display a random item each time.

How does it work?

• You can create a new list with the ability to edit it and delete it.
• Every time you spin the wheel, the app will choose a random item to display.
• Once you've gone through your whole list, you can go back to your list.
• As long as you don't clear your browser cookies, you can always access your most recent list!

Some programming quirks

Feeling the pain of regex

I'm not a huge fan of using regex (which stands for "regular expression"), so it was a bit of a pain to format the user's input into an array and then back into a string. I'm still figuring out the best way to deal with edge cases – like, what do I do if the user doesn't follow my instructions on how to enter their list? What if they use line breaks instead of commas to separate their list items?

  // regex logic for turning the user's input into an array
  formatStringToArr = (string) => { 
    return string.replace( /[\r\n]+/gm, ", " ).split(", ")
  }

  // taking the new array, randomizing the order by using the chance dependency, and then turning into a string again to save it to localStorage
  formatLocalStorage = () => {
  let peopleArray = this.formatStringToArr(localStorage.people)
  peopleArray = chance.shuffle(peopleArray)
  localStorage.setItem("people", peopleArray.join(", "))

  this.setState({
    array: peopleArray
  })
}

State management

I initially used Redux for global state management and stored the backend data in a db.json file. I quickly gave up on this idea when I realized that it would be overkill. Instead, I ended up refactoring my app to get and set the user's data with localStorage!

  // saving the user's input to the local state
  handleChange = (event) => {
    this.setState({
      [event.target.name]: event.target.value
    })
  }

  // saving the local state to localStorage and then redirecting the user to their new list page!
  handleSubmit = (event) => {
    event.preventDefault()
    localStorage.setItem("title", this.state.title)
    localStorage.setItem("people", this.state.people)
    this.props.history.push("/list")
  }

To auth or not to auth?

I also wanted to avoid implementing authentication – it seemed more accessible to allow the users to quickly create a list and play around with it, rather than forcing them to sign up before they could access any of the features. With the freedom of not needing to build auth, I started to brainstorm how I could structure the app without a backend API.

The story behind Winner Winner

As a software engineering coach at Flatiron School, I lead several meetings a week where I have to pick on students to participate. We usually do a popcorn-style rotation where the person who just participated picks the next person to go. But with 25 students and 4 instructors in the class, it can be tedious taking account of who's already gone and who's still left.

I took this as a chance to create a fun, light tool that would be useful for teachers, managers, and anyone else who needs a randomized list!

One of my goals this year is also to become a stronger frontend developer and familiarize myself more with different JavaScript frameworks. I love working with React, so I decided to give myself the goal of creating this app within a couple weeks. Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner! is built using React and styled components.

Conclusion

Thanks for stopping by, and please make sure to check out Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner! It's also on Product Hunt if you want to give it an upvote. 💓