#411 — December 18, 2024 |
🎄 This week we're taking a look back at how things went in the React world in 2024, as well as revisiting the most clicked items of the year, in case you missed them at the time. |
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🗓️ Top React Developments & Items of 2024 |
React had a good 2024, though it felt quieter than some years in terms of big developments and updates. Every technology has these moments, especially when it's dominant in its space, but nonetheless, a variety of things did happen:
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Introducing Authentication Support for React Router — Clerk announces beta support for React Router, including pre-built UI components, server utilities, and low level utilities for any of your custom flows. You can use React Router both as a framework or library with Clerk. Clerk sponsor |
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🥇 Top Articles of the Year |
Now for a quick look at the top six links we included in the newsletter (skipping things already mentioned above), based on reader engagement: |
1. How to Start a React Project in 2024 — It seems appropriate we started out 2024 with a look at the pros and cons of a few approaches to kicking off a React app. I bet we'll be getting a 2025 edition soon too! Robin Wieruch |
2. React 19 Cheat Sheet — From Kent C Dodds of Epic React fame came this part cheat sheet and part reminder of some of the things you can do in React 19. Kent C. Dodds |
3. Why Use Redux Today? — The maintainer of the popular Redux state management library gave a talk at React Summit 2024 where he gave a thorough introduction to the history of Redux, how it grew, and the benefits it continues to provide. There are detailed slides if you’d prefer not to watch the video. Mark Erikson |
4. Enhancing The New York Times' Web Performance with React 18 — Late in 2023, the team at The New York Times set out to take full advantage of React 18 on its flagship news site. This was an interesting case study looking at the challenges faced in upgrading, and the significant benefits they managed to take advantage of. Ilya Gurevich (NYT) |
5. Component Composition is Great, BTW — A well-regarded author writes about using component composition to avoid conditional rendering for mutually exclusive states (and why we should all be doing the same). Dominik Dorfmeister (AKA TkDodo) |
6. Bulletproof React: A Scalable Architecture for Production Apps — A popular opinionated guide to how you can structure a large scale React app. It’s had a few major updates over the years, but notably now includes a Next.js version, with both app router and page router approaches. Alan Alickovic |
⚙️ Top Repos of the Year |
1. Next.js SaaS Starter: A Next.js Template for Webapps — A starter template for building a SaaS-style webapp using Next.js with support for authentication, Stripe integration, and a dashboard for logged-in users. It uses Postgres and Drizzle for the database and UI elements based on shadcn/ui and Tailwind. Lee Robinson (Vercel) |
2. Functional UI Kit: A Unified Figma and React UI Component Kit — Despite many attempts, it doesn’t feel like anyone has really perfected the Figma - React connection yet, but this was a good attempt to bridge the design/code gap, funded by Figma’s Community Creators Fund. No updates in several months, however.. Alex Yakir et al. |
3. MistCSS: Build Components with Just CSS — Forget about CSS-in-JS, what about JS-from-CSS? This approach provided a way to compile CSS-only React components into a TypeScript equivalent, but as of the recent v1.0 release it went a step further and doesn't generate or require any JavaScript at all.. A neat idea. Typicode |
4. assistant-ui: React Components for AI Chat — It doesn’t just give you the interface components, but has integrations for Vercel AI, Langchain, and talking to other common LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI’s), enabling you to build your own in-house AI chat system quickly. Examples. Simon Farshid |
5. Puck: A Self-Hosted Drag-and-Drop Editor for React — Sitting somewhere between an old-school WYSIWYG-powered CMS and a headless one, Puck enables content teams to author content using real React components. Want to see a demo? Of course. Measured |
🎄 We're now off for two weeks for our Christmas break. Merry Christmas if you celebrate too. We return on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. |