New in React

 

​React.js - The Documentary​

The React.js Documentary is out! It's a really great one that tells the initial story of React, mostly around the 2011-2015 period. As you will see, the initial reception of React wasn't that good !

Although I've been using it since almost the beginning, I still learned many things that I wasn't aware of, like Shane O'Sullivan who agreed to leave aside his Bolt framework, or Jing Chen who helped battle test React on the Facebook Ads app, among many other things.

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​Adopting React in the Early Days​

I also wrote an article for Honeypot that was just published today. A nice complement to the React documentary above of the 2013-2015 period, from an outsider's perspective.

Before 2013, I was a Java CTO who didn't like JavaScript much . People you may have never heard of like Pete Hunt and David Nolen convinced me to ramp up on the frontend, adopt it in my startup, and turned me into a big React fan for the next decade.

I tried to explain many of the challenges we all faced back then and how to overcome them, including many old school code snippets. I also shared my view of how React was designed over the year compared to other frameworks.

If you like it, I'd appreciate a retweet 

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​State of React-Native Results​

The State of React-Native survey results are live for the very first year! Many of you answered, thank you for that! I guess we can call it a success!
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Software Mansion gave me the opportunity to help on this project as a media partner. I commented on a few sections and the intro/conclusion.

It's really exciting to check out the current satisfaction of many tools in our ecosystem, and it can also help you make more informed tech decisions. What I'm looking forward to is making this a success every year so we can see how the trends change over time.

I'm sharing with you a few results that I found particularly interesting.

React-Native developers do not reject modern native frameworks like SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose. They don't particularly like Flutter although many have tried it. They don't like much WebView-based solutions.

The biggest surprise for me was how many React-Native developers were previously Frontend developers. It looks like our community is really into cross-platform!

There's no clear styling winner yet. Tamagui and NativeWind looks promising, but there's probably still room for innovation. StyleSheet is not the most convenient API but works fine. Not sure why people dislike inline styles .

Make sure to check the full survey result because I can't add everything here and there are many other interesting insight.

I'd like to give a shoutout to the Software Mansion team for organizing this survey. I also take the opportunity to help them promote their App.js conference. I've been there last year and it was really awesome. I'll most likely go again this year.

Protezy Poznań