The Road to React in 2023
Hi everyone. This is Robin from “The Road to React”. You haven’t heard from me in a while, however, at the beginning of this year I have written a few articles which may be of great interest to you.
Before, I want to say that you can unsubscribe any time from this Newsletter. Just scroll to the the very end of this email if you don’t like to hear from me anymore.
Web Development Trends
Personally I got enthusiastic about web development last year again. While we had a few quiet years in JavaScript with React.js on the throne, we can see a turning of the tide with all the new trends happening.
I wrote an entire article about 10 Web Development Trends. The most interesting one for React developers may the the ongoing SSR efforts. While Next.js has played a tremendous role over the last years, there are new candidates (SvelteKit, SolidStart, Qwik City) and paradigms (e.g. Streaming SSR, Island Architectures) on the horizon.
But there are a lot of other trends going on such as serverless databases (e.g. PlanetScale), JS runtimes (e.g. Deno and Bun), end-to-end type safety (e.g. tRPC) and utility-first CSS. The latter may be almost synonymously known as Tailwind CSS. Are you a fan of it?
Anyway, we see so many things shaking up the industry (yet again) and I am so excited to experience where this goes for JavaScript ….
Popular React Libraries
Since 2017 I am helping companies and their teams as a freelance developer in React where I do workshops, create MVPs, solve complex UI problems, create custom components, or join a team implementing large scale applications with them.
Thus React feels like a 2nd home with all the work I am accomplishing in this space. Therefore I create every year a list of my favorite libraries in React. Do these libraries align with your day to day choices in React land?
On another React.js note: Whenever there is a noteworthy update in React, I release a new edition of my book “The Road to React”. 2021 I started to use Vite instead of CRA for my freelance projects. One year later, it turns out to be the default for React users which isn’t surprising.
The Road to React (2023) uses Vite and Vitest for setup and testing. Furthermore, the book provides opt-in TypeScript at the end of every section. I am not sure yet whether TypeScript should become the default though. What are your thoughts on it?
You can get the latest edition on my website or Amazon. If you have bought the book in the past as paperback, feel free to send me an email, so that I can give you access to the latest edition on my website. If you have learned React with my book(s) and articles, let me know!
If you are still a beginner in React, you may enjoy these two reads from me which I didn’t send with any update yet:
A beginners guide to Forms in React
The difference between elements and components in React
Last, I want to re-share my web development setup for 2023, because it has been popular last year among developers. If you are into VSCode and iTerm, this may have some nice gotchas for you. Updated it for this year!
Thanks everyone who made it to the end. Looking forward to write more this year about React, TypeScript, and web development in general.
Best, Robin
Hello Robin, I have the 2021 edition of The Road to React and I'm having challenges with the "Testing in React" chapter.
In particular I'm flagged early in the test with "SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module" for importing axios.
I noticed above that "The Road to React (2023) uses Vite and Vitest for setup and testing." Will this update help resolve my issues with the Testing chapter?