This Week In React #274 ⚛️ Next.js, React Router, Storybook, HeroUI| 📱 Reanimated, Worklets, Nitro Fetch, Navigation | 🔀 TypeScript, Signals

#react #reactnative

Hi everyone, Seb here 👋!

This week: a new Next.js release, a React Aria-based UI library, Remotion updates, Storybook MCP, and more.

On React Native, multi-threading keeps improving (Worklets, Reanimated), and React Navigation v8 looks close.

Sorry for the weird duplicate email last week, just a mistake 😅

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⚛️ React

Next.js 16.2

A great minor release that comes with significant performance improvements, but also impactful DX improvements and new interesting features:

~400% faster next dev startup
~50% faster rendering thanks to a React core RSC contribution
Redesigned error page
Server Function logging in dev
next dev --inspect to attach a Node.js debugger
Link transitionTypes
Dev Overlay now renders Error.cause and a hydration diff indicator to identify client/server
Many new experimental features
AI improvements: generates AGENTS.md to read versioned docs for agents, browser log forwarding, agent devtools CLI.
Turbopack improvements: Faster builds, Server Fast Refresh, tree shaking of dynamic imports, PostCSS config, Subresource Integrity, inline loader config, and more.

Related resources:

📜Implementing Next.js 16 'use cache' with next-intl Internationalization - Recently updated to include usage of the new experimental.rootParams feature, letting cached components read the locale directly instead of receiving it as a prop.
📜 Error Handling in Next.js with catchError - This new unstable_catchError() API is a framework-aware alternative to react-error-boundary that discards Next.js control flow errors and can refetch RSC data.
🎥 Ankita Kulkarni - Next.js 16.2 Just Changed AI Coding Forever

💸 Product for Engineers - WTF does a product manager do? (and why engineers should care)
📜 Start naming your useEffect functions, you will thank me later - Advocates for giving an inline name to Effect functions to convey your intent, even if it’s encapsulated within a custom hook. If you can’t find a decent name, maybe the Effect does too much or should not exist.
📜 use(): The Hook That Breaks the Rules (On Purpose)
📜 Test IDs are an a11y smell
📜 Type Safety in React Router
📜 Post-React Compiler React Coding Guide (For AI Agents)
💸 Sentry - Why your Next.js stack traces point to random chunks (and how to fix it)
📦 React Router 7.13.1 & 7.13.2 - Recent patches introduced new unstable APIs such as the getRequest() API for RSCs, and a future flag to access “pass-through” (un-normalized) Request objects. The <Link unstable_mask> makes it easier to implement URL masking, letting you replicate Instagram-like UX: open gallery images in a modal, and render them full screen on refresh.
📦 HeroUI 3.0 - We usually don’t feature most UI libraries, but this one, based on React Aria and Tailwind, has been cooking for a while, and looks more polished than the average UI lib. Although it’s not a cross-platform abstraction, it offers a React Native variant using similar composition patterns and design tokens.
📦 Storybook 10.3 - MCP, Vite 8, Next.js 16.2, ESLint 10 - There’s a dedicated article on the Storybook MCP for React.
📦 Lucide Icons 1.0 - Quite popular icon solution in React and shacn/ui.
📦 Lexical 0.42 - Extensible text editor framework from Meta
📦 Hiraki - Zero-dependency React drawer component
📦 json-render Ink - Generative UI for the terminal, comes with 27 React components
🎥 Jonny Burger - Remotion is getting even better! - Cool features landed recently in the React video creation tool, such as Light Leaks, Sound Effects, Rspack, and AI-related improvements. Let’s not forget the integration with Vercel Sandbox: I wouldn’t be surprised if we could soon fully vibe-code videos directly in the cloud.

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Worklets 0.8 - Shareable, Bundle mode improvements

It’s now easier to use the Bundle mode, which unlocks running more complex things in background threads. Also read the dedicated article on Shareable – shared memory's missing piece, a runtime-bound shared memory primitive that was extracted from Reanimated, and that you can now use for non-animation use cases too!