[Epic] Standardize app code and architecture including using React

[vegetabill]

This is more of an epic (and placeholder) but presumably we want the codebase to be easy for others to contribute to and be an educational environment for volunteers and students. Currently, this codebase wouldn't represent best practices for students to reference in interviews etc.

Here are some possible ideas in that vein:

• Switch the view to render via React components
  • All client state should move inside a root component or something like Redux
• Move active development back to master vs gh-pages using main for trunk dev
• Improve contributor readme docs
  • Slack or github contact info for who to talk to
  • How to build & test locally
  • Include suggestions for commit messages
  • Any desired coding style guide should be referenced and enforced via hooks Captured as Add prettier support and enforce with commit hook #89
• ✅ Consume dependencies in a standard way using yarn or npm

[lindes]

Not sure if this deserves to be its own issue, or if it could fit in with this, but another thought I have is to calculate the content of the "keys" data in shortcuts.json based on the "answer" data -- and generally to use symbolic names for things throughout the code, rather than hard-coded numeric values (except if/when absolutely necessary -- like maybe a one-time mapping between the names and numbers, a la the modifierMap in keymaster.js, but going the other direction and with different names -- though ideally, we'd also avoid duplication of effort there, some way, by building the map for one direction from the map for the other, if possible.)

[vegetabill]

@alodahl this seems like a wishlist item and some of these are already done, e.g. there is now a package.json file. If we still think some of the individual subtasks are feasible and important, I can split them into new issues that someone might actually pick up.

[alodahl]

FYI this is not priority, but we can look at it later. In the next few weeks it would be best to get the backend issues ready.

[vegetabill]

Sounds good. I updated the body of this ticket to reflect ideas that were already done or are already separate tickets.

I think the only idea still worth having here is converting view layer to React but IIRC that was an explicit decision not to change. If so, we can just close this or repurpose its title to represent that idea and we can document the reasoning for/against it in case the suggestion is made in the future.