New York Times internship
Time period: June 2020 – Present
Role: Frontend Engineering Intern
Keywords: React, Backbone, Rails
I’m interning on the frontend team of NYT Cooking!
Over the summer, I made major improvements to the site footer, both visually and under the hood:
- Implement design updates
- Display on Recipe Box page
- Replatform to React
Implement design updates
- before
- after
Display on Recipe Box page
This was an interesting interaction to think about; the recipe box interface (with the fixed sidebar and the recipe cards) was designed to be a full screen experience so there was nowhere to fit the footer. As a result, I ended up using JavaScript to detect when to shift up the sidebar to make space for the footer.
- animation
Replatform to React
My biggest project this summer was converting this footer to a React component!
The Cooking frontend system is currently a mix of Ruby templates, Backbone.js views, and React components. When updating a piece of the frontend, the engineer first has to figure out what framework that particular UI is written in! The footer was a mix of all of these. It’s also not just a static component, since it also contained the logic for the CCPA opt out notice (the “Do not sell my personal information” stuff).
Throughout this process, I learned a lot about how to structure components, work with a Redux store which I’ve never done before, and how server-side rendering works.
I was also responsible for updating unit tests and functional tests related to the footer.
Learnings
- getting better at reaching out to people
- reviewing PRs
- recipes