Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled implementing a schedule view. It was a bit of a journey, but I think I landed in a pretty good spot.
First off, I needed to figure out exactly what this schedule view was supposed to do. I spent a good chunk of time talking to the stakeholders, getting the requirements nailed down. What events needed to be displayed? How should they be grouped? What kind of interactions were expected? Basic stuff, but super important to get right up front.
Next, I started exploring different UI libraries and frameworks. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, you know? I looked at a bunch of options, trying to find something that already had a decent calendar component. Ultimately, I chose [Hypothetical Library/Framework Name] because it seemed flexible enough and had good documentation – or so I hoped!
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I created a new component, imported the necessary modules from the library, and started messing around with the basic calendar display. It looked okay out of the box, but it definitely needed some serious customization.
Then came the fun part: integrating the actual schedule data. I had to write some code to fetch the events from our backend API, transform them into the format that the calendar component expected, and then pass them in as props. This involved a lot of * statements and a fair bit of head-scratching. Turns out, the API returned dates in a weird format, so I had to write a custom function to parse them correctly. That was a bit of a time sink.
Next up was styling. The default styles were… not great. I spent a good amount of time tweaking the CSS, adjusting the colors, fonts, and layout to match our design system. I also had to figure out how to add custom tooltips when you hover over an event. That involved some digging into the library’s API, but I eventually figured it out.
One of the trickier parts was handling event collisions. If two events were scheduled for the same time slot, they would just overlap. I had to write some logic to detect these collisions and then adjust the event display to prevent them from overlapping. I ended up using a simple algorithm that shifted the events slightly to the left or right, depending on how many collisions there were. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.
Finally, I added some interactive features. You can now click on an event to see more details. I also implemented a date picker that lets you jump to a specific day or week. And I added some filters to allow users to filter the events by category.
Testing was, of course, crucial. I made sure everything was working as expected across different browsers and devices. I also asked some colleagues to try it out and give me feedback. They found a few bugs, which I promptly fixed.
Deployed it to production and monitored it closely for the first few days. Thankfully, no major issues popped up. Phew!
All in all, it was a challenging but rewarding experience. I learned a lot about [Hypothetical Library/Framework Name] and how to build a complex UI component from scratch. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
