Day 20 | KendoReact | Tinkering with Telerik Products has Always Been My Happy Place

So...unfortunately, my live stream earlier didn't quite go according to plan did it? Had to handle a few minor hiccups along the way, but I do hope it was still alright. Honestly, I've never been very good at managing a live stream. I've been trying to get onto that bandwagon for years, but I never really found something that would keep me motivated to keep doing it. At least not until I had the inspiration to start this "Dev-to-Design" series. This just might be the reason I need because nothing makes me more motivated and happy than being able to constantly tinker with Telerik's products.

So, officially, I wanna welcome you into my happy place. No matter how bad the day is, how how crappy things get, at the end of the day/week, I've always enjoyed my own personal time with Telerik's products. I've been doing this for a very long time. In fact, tinkering with Telerik's products is my No. 2 happy place, right behind playing my favourite PC games. These are just activities that helps to provide a form of escapism. We all need an escape from the world some times right?

The Usual Stuff, Just Some Introduction to Get Out of the Way

Even though I may have been making videos and posting them up online in the past, I feel like I might need to reintroduce myself again. That is within the context of this whole renewal/revitalization of my YT channel. I am also going to need to redo that banner for my YT channel. Some of the social links are outdated. Plus I don't have a FB account anymore. And I'm more active on Twitter (sorry, "X") and LinkedIn these days. So I'll make the necessary changes and updates soon enough. I just need a little bit of time to do the work.

Next 3~4 Episodes will Focus on KendoReact's DataGrid Control

As explained in my live stream, I plan to dedicate the next few episodes of my live stream to my own deep-dive into the Kendo DataGrid control. Unlike other technical content creators, I know that a lot of developers tend to follow the whole, "copy-and-paste" thing during a video or live stream, but for my own deep-dive, I'm more focused on actually learning something. This is my journey, and I'm hoping to bring you (my viewers) along for the ride. So, the last thing I'd ever want to do is simply go through the motions.

That is also why I was more than happy to take my time typing the code that I see from the documentations. As a passionate self-learner, I've always believed that the best way to truly learn something is to practice it, apply it. By actually typing in most of the code, I'll also get to see how they would do it.

A very big part of the reason that enabled me to gain my former recognition as a top front-end developer was actually because of what I've learned by going through Telerik's documentations. By really digging into it, and then finding ways to apply it and understand when and how to use those functionalities helped me to become a better front-end developer outside of using Telerik's products.

And now, I am hoping to do the very same. To really dig in, and dig deep.

The Grid Control has Always Been the Most Versatile/Powerful UI Control by Telerik

When you explore and try out the different UI controls from Telerik's library of products, you will notice that the Grid control (regardless of which product you use) is still the most powerful UI control they have ever created. Sure, there are other pretty amazing UI controls in their arsenal too, but man, nothing really quite comes close to the Grid, or DataGrid. Its name has been swapped a few times over the years.

It's probably also the main reason why, subconsciously I wanted to start my live streams with a deep exploration into the Kendo DataGrid control. It is my favourite UI control.

Custom Sorting Function

I wanted to focus in specifically on the Custom Sorting Function capability for sorting columns in the DataGrid. One of the reasons why I've always loved the Grid control in general is having the ability to perform complex operations on how you want the data to be visualized in the front-end of a website or desktop app.

Since I already have the experience of trying to build a custom table from scratch and needing to write my own sorting functions to add to it, I can tell you that it is just not worth the time and effort. I mean, the product team has already done all of the hard work for us, so why reinvent the wheel right? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Honestly, and I know how some other devs might react to what I'm saying, but working with KendoReact's DataGrid is really so easy. I mean, just look at the code snippet above.

And in the case of this custom sort function example, you can write your own complex sorting functions either in a separate .js file and import it, or just place it within the same .jsx file.

Exploring Some Basic Filtering

One of the most commonly needed functionalities when it comes to implementing any DataGrid is to filter the data/records. Because of my vast experience working on web-based content management systems, I can tell you that sorting & filtering are the two most commonly required functionalities for any grid. The next one is probably pagination (paging) and grouping (e.g. grouping by product category). But I'll get into those over the next few live streams.

Before I ended my live stream, I wanted to just dive into one more example, so I decided to go with the basic filtering example.

To be honest, by the time I was done with the basic filtering example, I had almost forgotten about my struggles, worries and anxiety. I was finally in my own happy place. When I finally ended the live stream, I tried to spend a bit of time on my PC game, but I decided to log off so that I could have another 30 minutes to tinker with the DataGrid control before I go to bed.

Ask Me Anything About Telerik

Before I end tonight's entry, I want to repeat something that I've mentioned in my live stream today. As a 18-year veteran of using Telerik's products, if you have any kind of question that you'd like to ask me, anything that is related to the products, or anything related to my experience of using them over the years, or even my time working as a Telerik Evangelist at Progress , you can leave me a comment and I'll be more than happy to answer those questions.

I am so looking forward to the next live stream session. For the time being, I'm thinking of keeping my live streams to Mon, Wed and Fri, starting from 9.30 pm to 11pm (GMT +8). That way, I don't have to rush home to be on time for my own live stream.