#220 — January 6, 2021

Read on the Web

👋 We're back! We hope you've had a good holiday season as well, but React shows no sign of slowing down in 2021 so let's get straight to it. As always, if you have anything to send in for future issues, reply to us and we'll check it out.
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Peter Cooper and Terence C Gannon, your editors

React Status
Your weekly React news digest, every Wednesday

Introducing Zero-Bundle-Size React Server Components — Taking a fairly long holiday means news can break and there’s enough time for the target audience to absorb and respond to it. Just as we headed off in 2020, Dan Abramov and Lauren Tan of the React Core Team quietly dropped this piece hinting at an interesting new direction for React to take.

The big idea is 'React Server Components' and no, this isn't Server Side Rendering (SSR) but a more complementary idea. They want you to “think of your React app as a single tree that contains both client-side and server components” (RedwoodJS calls a similar idea 'full-stack Jamstack'). They break down the notion that some things always happen on the client or always on the server, so why not place the core where it's truly needed?

It’s a tall order. However, their talk presents the concept effectively: in the first segment, Dan lays out the theoretical case for React Server Components. In the second segment, Lauren demonstrates how they will work in practice and how they ‘feel’ in the hands of the developer. Dan then returns to wrap up the concept and solicit your feedback.

What are others saying? Check out independent commentary from Shawn ‘Swyx’ Wang, Addy Osmani and Louis Petrik. Clearly this is an initiative which is generating a lot of interest.

React Core Team

Stream Announced the Public v2.0 Availability of Their React Native SDK — The React Native Chat SDK v2.0 is fully TypeScripted, based on React Hooks and revised for performance improvements.

Stream sponsor

AnimXYZ: Create, Customize, and Compose Animations — “Powered by CSS variables to allow a nearly limitless number of unique animations without writing a single keyframe.” If that doesn’t get your attention, the demo will.

Ingram Projects

Inside the React Core Team — While the React Christmas advent calendar is seasonal in nature, the articles it contains are typically of interest year round (and there are plenty to catch up on from 2020). To conclude 2020's calendar, core team member Rachel Nabors wrote a brief essay about what being on the core team is really like and which one of them slays at karaoke.

Rachel Nabors

How Discord Implemented App-Wide Keyboard Navigation — With a reported 250 million users, Discord operates at a scale which is difficult for many to fully grasp. Here’s how they rolled out a key new feature to that massive community.

Jon Egeland

📘 Tutorials and Stories

▶  10 Next.js Tips You Might Not Know — It doesn’t hurt that the creator is on the Next.js team at Vercel too.

Lee Robinson

Super Optimized Static Sites — With Jekyll being well over a decade old, it’s high time that its core competency—templating—be re-implemented with React.

Jacob Parker

5 Ways Organizations Can Lean into Failure and Transform It into Success

LaunchDarkly sponsor

React Performance Optimization Tips — If one of your New Year’s resolution to finally tweak up the performance of your apps, these tips will help.

Harsh

How to Use the Redux Dev Tools to Speed up Development and Debugging — At first glance these two ideas may not appear to have much to do with each other. Redux is a state management library after all. But actually they do, as this article clearly illustrates.

Dillion Megida

Deck the Halls With React Three Fiber — Good thing it’s Twelfth Night, just in time to slip in one more seasonal item ‘til next year. May your New Year be 3D.

Ida Marie Vestgøte Bosch

An Engineering Leader’s Guide to OpenTelemetry

Lightstep sponsor

▶  Big, Boring Forms in React — Actually we don’t think they’re boring at all, at least not the way they’re presented in this video.

Cassio Zen

🛠 Code and Tools

dnd kit: A Modern Drag and Drop Toolkit for React — If react-dnd isn’t quite cutting it for you, this “new kit on the block” 😂 for building drag and drop interfaces might interest you.

Claudéric Demers

React Hot Toast: 'Beautiful' Customizable Notifications — The name is brilliant: who doesn’t like the smell of hot toast? But in this case, it’s actually a complete solution for React notifications which is almost as good.

Timo Lins

Juliette: Reactive State Management Powered by RxJS — If you’re an Angular developer who used NgRx in the past you’re going to love Juliette: it’s a NgRx-inspired state management library for React.

Marko Stanimirović

react-use-wizard: A Wizard Builder Powered by Hooks — We’re a little embarrassed to admit that we really like wizards: they’re a distillation of what you need to know just when you need to know it. Perhaps you should consider building one for your app’s users? Some examples.

Jonas De Vrient

useAuth 2.0: Add Authentication to Your React app
Swizec Teller

⚡️ Quick Bits:

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💻 Jobs

Senior Web Developer (Node/ReactJS) - Remote — Millions get inspired and plan adventures with our apps. To help us make komoot.com the place to go to plan outdoor adventures, we’re looking for a one of a kind Web Developer to join our team.

Komoot

Find Your Next Job Through Vettery — Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

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