Don’t Settle for Vanilla React
An essay about the importance of continual learning
I’ve been writing React code now for almost two years as my full-time job, and one thing that I’ve learned in those two years is that there are better ways of doing things coming out almost every couple weeks. The worst thing you could possibly do as a React developer (or as any type of developer, really) is to just keep doing things the same way year after year.
When I started writing apps, I used class-based components and they were enormous. Every aspect of the page was encoded in logic in a single big component (each button was a component, but any code for the buttons was included inside the main component somewhere). This made refactoring incredibly difficult.
Fortunately I was working with a really talented engineer who, like me, was always looking for better ways to do things and had a lot of things he could teach me. Within a month or two, I was writing small functional components with hooks and using Redux actions to keep a lot of the business logic out of the components. We got to a point where we were feeling really comfortable with the codebase and could crank out new features fairly quickly.
We weren’t done improving though. As much as I like Redux, it still is complicated to add even just a single action and state…
