Alright, so I decided to dive into this project called Owen Kelly this weekend. Sounded cool, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Had a rough couple days figuring it out, let me tell ya how it went.
Jumping In Headfirst
Just threw together a new folder on my laptop, like, “OwenKelly_Project.” Fired up that code editor everybody’s using these days. First thing, grabbed the supposed “starter template” from the docs. Copied the files over, did the usual npm install – waited for that thing to download half the internet’s worth of packages. Usual stuff.
Hitting the First Wall
Started the dev server. Boom, blank screen. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Console lit up like a Christmas tree with errors. Great. Scrolled through the terminal log – cryptic stuff about some module missing. Spent a good hour just trying to figure out what dependency wasn’t playing nice. Turns out I needed an older version of some random loader package. Downgraded it. Finally saw something resembling a webpage. Ugly, but it was there.
Trying to Make Sense of the UI
The template was… messy. Like, really messy. Found the main component file. Half the styles were inline, half in some separate sheet buried deep. The structure? Good luck. It felt like whoever wrote it started with one idea and then just kept adding stuff on top without cleaning up. Found the part that handles the sidebar navigation. That code looked rough. Hardcoded links everywhere, no proper routing setup. Why tf would you hardcode paths like that? Spent another chunk of the afternoon just trying to map out where things were supposed to go, deleting junk code line by line. Kept breaking things by accident.
That One Annoying Feature
Then came the date display feature. Supposed to show posts sorted by date. Sounds simple. Found the component that renders the list. Clicked around in the project files looking for where the data lived. Found it eventually – a massive JSON file tucked away in some obscure “data” folder. Dates were all strings like “2023-11-22”. Fine. Wrote a quick function to grab the entries, sort them by that date string. Easy-peasy. Pushed the changes. Went to the page. Scrolled down. Bam! Dates were showing, but the order was all messed up. Newest stuff at the bottom, oldest at the top? How? Checked my sort function. Looked good.
The Oh-Crap Moment
Stared at the sorted array in the console. It was sorting them alphabetically. Because the dates were strings. Duh! “2023-01-01” comes before “2023-12-31” alphabetically. Holy crap, felt stupid. Took me way longer than it should’ve to realize that. Changed the sort function to actually convert those strings into proper date objects before comparing. Hit save. Reloaded. Finally, posts ordered from newest to oldest. Laughed at myself for being so dense. Simple stuff, but trips you up.
Where I Left It (For Now)
By Sunday night, my head was buzzing. Made progress, sure. Got the core list displaying properly sorted. But man, the underlying structure? That JSON data file is huge and messy. The UI code feels brittle. One wrong move and everything crumbles. I’m seriously thinking I need to just rip it out and rebuild that whole section from scratch next time. Proper components, clean data handling, maybe use a small store for state. Feels like the only sane way forward with this thing. It’s hanging together by threads right now. Kinda frustrating, but also… kinda a fun puzzle to smash. We’ll see how next weekend goes!
