The React Newsletter

Hi <<First Name>>,

JavaScript to Know for React

One of the things I love most about React compared to other frameworks that I've used is how exposed you are to JavaScript when you're using it. There's no template DSL (JSX compiles to sensible JavaScript), the component API has only gotten simpler with the addition of React Hooks, and the framework offers you very little abstraction outside the core UI concerns it's intended to solve.

Because of this, learning JavaScript features is really advisable for you to be effective building applications with React. So here are a few JavaScript features I'd recommend you spend some time learning so you can be as effective as possible working with React.

Before we get into some syntax stuff, another thing that's really useful to understand for React is the concept of a function "closure". There's a great write-up of this concept here: whatthefork.is/closure.

Ok, let's get to the JS features you'll want to know for React.

Inside the React Core team

When I first came to work on the React team at Facebook, I wasn’t sure what to expect. From the outside, the React Core team seemed huge! But it turned out that folks like Eli White and Sebastian McKenzie were on React Native. And most of the famous trainers whose names spring to mind when you think of React have never been anywhere near Facebook or the Core Team. Throw in the maintainers of all of the open source libraries that enable the React community like Chakra UI and Framer Motion, and suddenly “React Core” looks like it could fill a stadium! But the reality is quite the opposite.

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Data Fetching with React Server Components

For comments, please find the RFC link in the blog post: https://reactjs.org/server-components

2020 has been a long year. As it comes to an end we wanted to share a special Holiday Update on our research into zero bundle size React Server Components. The demo is available now whether you want to play with it during the holiday, or when work picks back up in the new year.

Happy holidays from the React Core and the React Data teams!

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JWT Authentication Best Practices

Microservices are a great tool when it comes to designing scalable and extensible architectures. They can be used to encapsulate different behaviors or responsibilities in a way that not a lot of other architecture paradigms can represent. And if you pair them with a REST-based interface, then you’re not only writing and creating a platform that can grow and scale automatically (given the right infrastructure of course), but you’re also creating a standard and easy-to-use product.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m a fan of microservices and they’re usually the pattern I go with when designing new architectures, working with Big Data on a day-to-day basis, I tend to require flexibility and scalability out of the box, and they provide that to me.

The thing not everyone considers when writing microservices though is that they require a way for you to authenticate against them. Both if you’re using a front-end client or just communicating with them through another microservice. And although there are several options out there to solve authentication, I want to cover one of the easiest, yet most powerful, alternative: JSON Web Tokens.

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Moving OkCupid from REST to GraphQL

A lot has been written about the benefits of moving from a REST API to a GraphQL API¹. But let’s say that you’re already convinced. If you want to convert a site with millions of users, ensure that performance doesn’t suffer, and just really don’t want to screw it up: how do you do it?

We embarked on this journey last year and made it out alive to tell the tale! Our GraphQL API is now the official API at OkCupid, with all clients adopting it: our iOS and Android apps, as well as our desktop and mobile web single-page React apps.

So, here’s how we tackled this huge project. I’ll talk a little about what we built, the strategy we came up with to test the new code we were shipping, and a few things that could have gone better on the technology side. Disclaimer: this article is more about the process than the code itself; to hear about the performance issues we had to overcome to reach parity with our previous API, read about our first release here.

Advanced frontend Interview topics with React

First, let me be clear that this article doesn't teach you anything. This only organizes the topics and ideas with small summaries about each one.

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React video courses

Because I need to pay my bills 😉