(This article is also available on the DEV community without the paywall.) This week, Sophie Alpert and I presented the “Hooks” proposal at React Conf, followed by a deep dive from Ryan Florence: I strongly recommend to watch this opening keynote to see the problems we’re trying to solve…

People often choose Redux before they need it. “What if our app doesn’t scale without it?” Later, developers frown at the indirection Redux introduced to their code. “Why do I have to touch three files to get a simple feature working?” Why indeed! People blame Redux, React, functional programming, immutability…

I receive programming questions on Twitter, GitHub, email, and other channels. I try to answer them when I can. Lately I haven’t been able to do that very well because I’m a human and don’t scale. For personal questions, I maintain an AMA. If you want to know my favorite…

or, an Ode to Accidental Complexity — Note: React Hot Loader 3, released a month after I published this article, solves most of the problems described in this post. Give it a try! React Transform is an experimental project I started after giving the Hot Reloading with Time Travel talk at React Europe. My goal was to…

Many people get confused by the difference between components, their instances, and elements in React. Why are there three different terms to refer to something that is painted on screen? If you’re new to React, you probably only worked with component classes and instances before. For example, you may declare…

There is a growing sentiment in the JavaScript community that ES6 classes are not awesome: Classes obscure the prototypal inheritance at the core of JS. Classes encourage inheritance but you should prefer composition. Classes tend to lock you into the first bad design you came up with. I think it’s…

Today I gave a talk on React Hot Loader, Redux, and the powerful developer tools that Redux makes possible. If you haven’t seen my talk yet, wait for the video — I’m sure it’ll be up soon! In an earlier version of the slides, I had an “Inspiration” slide. I cut it, like I cut many other slides, to fit into the 30 minutes cap. If you were inspired by my talk, you probably already saw these three talks.

There has been no shortage of great Flux implementations, such as Flummox, Alt, or Fluxible. Most of them are focused on making Flux easier to use with the server rendering and reducing the boilerplate. They also often provide convenience utilities like higher-order components and asynchronous action helpers. …

Update The ideas from this post have now materialized in babel-plugin-react-transform and its ecosystem. Check out react-transform-boilerplate! React Hot Loader is my first JavaScript open-source project. It has enjoyed a tremendous response, and it has changed my professional life. True functional programmers don’t take it seriously, but comparing the wonder…