First live React project

We’ve been reworking the Boardgame Cafes Map and I think it’s come out quite well. The original map was built with multiple calls to the cafes API endpoint whenever you selected a new country it reloaded the page and data set which filtered down the results by country. The problem with this is that you couldn’t move around the map and discover cafes in the next country over or easily get back to the original full map without a costly page refresh, it felt clumsy and not very slick. With React a single call to the cafes API gives us the entire data set which we then build multiple components from, the country select list, the cafe list, the cafe markers and lightbox content.

I am sure there are many more features we can add to improve it but for now it’s relaunched and working great on desktop and mobile.