Previously, I had created a light Boostrap page that hooked into my InfoCentral API to pull information about active websites I host. After my experience using an application at one of my jobs–a sleek web portal for users to put in requests to an otherwise complicated facility work management system–I decided to try and make an improved version of my Bootstrap page that could both provide a different experience using my application, and also be easy to develop.
I spent the latter half of a Saturday and the following Sunday reading up about ReactJS, something I heard mentioned in some web development courses I took in college. I got far enough to have a log-in form that received a token back from the API, but getting the application to work in other ways proved a bit difficult. I then looked into Angular–supposedly the harder of the two to learn–and after brute-forcing my way through a tutorial, and clobbering together some online help posts from other users, the framework clicked and I was able to develop a nice little foundation for making future interfaces for parts of my program.