Yesterday I was itching to leave the house for a short afternoon photo trip. But I was also working on a church app for a couple days and I had reached another roadblock where I could not get through.

I started this React Native app, for iOS and Android, close to the end of 2020. It’s been a long process of learning a new programming language. Right before this week, I had taken a long break to focus on other work. I was also tackling a different learning curve then and realized I needed to study the React language to learn about setting, updating, and reading states so the app would pass data between screens.

There’s a video course on Teachable taught by Code with Mosh. He’s slow going and detailed. His courses are kept updated. Despite having another course on Udemy, I gravitate to Mosh. There are tutorials on YouTube but I have to be sure their videos are using the same version of React Navigation that my app uses.

The dilemma was how to change the title in the header of the stack navigation with nested screens in a drawer navigation. The app was working properly, the drawer was working after switching away from bottom tab navigation. At first, I was using a title within each screen and wanted it to change in the header of the parent stack but the screen options weren’t being passed. I looked at a lot of tutorials and tried them but kept undoing those changes.

At this point I was ready to throw in the towel and go on the trip. I was thinking, “staying at home will not solve this problem if I keep staring at the screen.” Even walking helped at times to sort out my thoughts.

I walked into the backyard while praying for help and picked enough blackberries to fill half a plastic cup, which I grabbed leaving through the back door in the garage. After walking around the backyard to look at the two producing fig trees that my dad had planted that weren’t ripe yet, I went back inside and washed the blackberries in cold water and placed them inside the fridge on the top shelf. I felt refreshed.

A short time passed by, reading through the React Navigation developer’s documentation. I found a page open in a tab and a link jumped off the page when I skimmed over it. I scrolled back up and read that part carefully, clicked on the link, added that code, saved the file, and “Yay, it worked!” I was ecstatic and thankful to Jesus Christ for answering my prayer for help.

Here’s a direct link to the solution.

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Here is an animated GIF of the latest progress I’ve made on this app. At this point, I’ve laid out the content on each page and the number of pages needed in the menu as discussed with the pastor. There are pages to add after I have learned about passing variables between screens. I’m researching user interface themes and how to use the Google Calendar API to pull in a custom-built agenda.