Making sense of Redux

Willson Mock
6 min readAug 9, 2016

When I first started learning React, I remember reading lots of articles about the different technologies associated with it.

In particular, this one article stood out. It mentions how confusing the ecosystem is, and how developers often feel they have to know ALL of the ecosystem before using React.

And as someone who’s used React daily for the past 8 months or so, I can definitely say that I’m still barely scratching the surface in terms of understanding how the entire ecosystem works!

But my time spent using React has given me some insight into when and why it might be appropriate to use another technology — Redux (a variant of the Flux architecture).

You’ll know when you need Flux. If you aren’t sure if you need it, you don’t need it.

This quote comes from the same article I mentioned above, and it pretty much summarizes how I feel about Redux.

I definitely didn’t see the need for Flux initially, and I feel that you can create productive applications just using React. But I’m starting to see the benefits of Redux.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss why I think Redux makes sense and provide a visual analogy for internalizing the different parts of Redux better.

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Willson Mock

I’m an avid learner, and I write about web technologies, personal fitness, and other fun stuff. http://willsonmock.com