HACKER Q&A
📣 mettamage

Fast way to relearn React industry best practices?


I'm in a coding session with a recruiter soon to show off my front-end skills. The truth is, I haven't coded front-end in a while and am out of date with industry best practices. What's a good way to as quickly as possible relearn this?

I have about 4 years of software dev experience, mostly back-end. In my first year it was mostly front-end (in React).

I was wondering if something like [1] would help. But I just remember that name from somewhere. I don't know if it's any good.

What's your advice?

[1] https://frontendmasters.com

  👤 mettamage Accepted Answer ✓
Update: I currently just decided to learn it via frontendmasters.com.

I'm not sure if it is the best thing, but it seems to be good enough for now. The teacher is contextualizing a few things that I would for sure not get by just reading the docs. We started out with React.createElement() and I remembered what it was (it has been a while, ha!). But I've never created a page in that way. After 30 min. of that and 1 hour of setting everything up, it's now time for actual React.

I'm also a video watcher, so I gues that helps too.

I once learned React myself by reading Road To React in 2017 and have used it in my work, even last year. But given that I've never labeled myself as a front-end developer I want a more coherent picture than just "oh yea, I can work in a React codebase and make it work." Which is what I've been doing all these years. Well that and backend and keeping up to date on security.

👤 kypro
As a JS dev I'm always shocked by the amount of variance and the lack of best practices in JS codebases...

Others will disagree, but I'd argue there are no real agreed on best practices like you might find in languages like Java in the JS/React world. Counter intuitively the JS community will often back away from tried and tested approaches since these get labeled as stale and boring so devs will often prefer to use whatever the hot new thing is when they spin up a new project.

There will be some no-nos though. If you're following a tutorial from more than a few years ago they might not be using React hooks, for example. Next.js is also starting to become fairly industry standard these days so that would also be a good shout in most cases.

👤 aristofun
Find any decent looking examples of projects relying on hooks, react-query, typescript and avoids redux. And recreate, tinker with them.
👤 joshxyz
just learn hooks from react.dev docs.

you can do a lot with vite, mantine.dev, zustand, and tanstack query.

if you want pain, you can try nextjs where you can optionally learn react server stuff.

👤 tanepiper
Recently I had to start writing React again after at least 5-6 years. Best way for me was to dive in with an existing bit of code that needed ported to it (sadly one of the systems we have has a React-only design system). After a few weeks I've got some pretty good code, and I'm adding tests just now (using vitest).

I found as I progressed I got to understand it a bit better (especially the use* stuff) and now I'm pretty confident again with it.