Pokedex

This project started a long time ago, even before I really knew how to program. I have always been a huge fan of the Pokemon games, and a Pokedex felt like the natural dream project: the in-universe encyclopedia of species, characteristics, abilities, and habitats that trainers live out of in the games.

When I finally learned React, I treated it as the chance to ship that idea. I followed a YouTube tutorial as my guide. My React knowledge was thin at the time, but caring about the subject matter kept me going when the concepts were new.

PokeAPI became the backbone: pull structured data for each creature, wire it into the UI, and learn how a modern front end talks to an HTTP API in practice. That alone was a big step compared to static pages.

Behind the scenes I had to think about state and component structure so the app stayed fast and predictable as people clicked through species. The same work taught me how to split the UI into pieces that made sense for loading, errors, and detail views.

On the surface, the fun part was making something that felt a little like the in-game device: recognizable, readable, and pleasant to click through. That pushed my CSS and general UX thinking more than a generic tutorial project would have.

Looking back, this was one of the first times code and a hobby lined up in a way that felt real. Seeing Pokemon I liked rendered from data I fetched myself made the whole “learn to build for the web” path click, and it nudged me to keep digging into React and everything around it.