The React community has shown leadership in innovation over the past few years and influenced the JavaScript world greatly. With successful additions to the JavaScript community such as Flow, Create-React-App, and ReactVR to name a few, solutions and improvements are consistently being made.
React community contributors such as Eve Porcello, Adam Perry, Jared Forsyth, Michaela Lehr, and Peggy Rayzis introduce their current projects in React.
Learning React, GraphQL, create-react-app, React Community
Eve Porcello talks learning React, providing training on React, and her book on React
Eve Porcello is a software engineer at Moon Highway that dedicates her time creating curriculums and writing about Javascript.
Eve started learning about development when she began working for Microsoft. In order to better understand specifications, she made the decision to educate herself on HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Her journey with React started with Yahoo, a company her team was working with at the time, who announced they would no longer be using YUI, Yahoo’s homegrown UI framework. Instead, developers would have to familiarize themselves with React. In following Yahoo’s lead, Eve came to love React as she learned how to use it. So much so, that she has now written a book on using React.
Eve also discusses her love for GraphQL and create-react-app in the interview featured below.
All in all, being a part of the React community is a rewarding experience for Eve. Not only does she provide courses and training for students, she is able to do so as a women. This to her is important and she very much enjoys being able to encourage other women to speak out about React and have their voices heard.
JavaScript, Flow, and TypeScript
Interview with Jared Forsyth on Working with JavaScript, Mobile Native Development, and Flow
Jared works with JavaScript and mobile native development at Khan Academy, where one of his passions is type systems.
In this interview Jared talks about working with Flow and how it compares to TypeScript. Overall, Flow is easy to incrementally adopt as it doesn’t force developers to write types for everything at once. However, both TypeScript and Flow are highly useful when creating applications. Descriptive error messages help developers and appear sooner than having cryptic and generic error messages at runtime.
In his opinion, Jared believes having a language to describe types and transformation of data makes code cleaner, more robust, and better organized.
Jared suggests ways of introducing Flow into a codebase when trying to gain adoption within a company and ideas around creating resources such as testimonials and blog posts about flow to the public.
CRNA and React Native
Adam Perry on the Benefits of Using create-react-native-app and the Challenges of Building Dev Tools
At Expo, Adam Perry builds react native developer tools and manages backend services. Recently, CRNA (create-react-native-app) was announced as an efficient and easy way to build native mobile apps. It can be installed directly from npm and can run projects instantly after downloading. One of the app’s key features include the native client, which is made available to users so they don’t have to wait for their code to build before iterating on the desired interface appearance.
Adam discusses starting with React Native not too long ago. He did not have much of a mobile application background as he did with web development, but found passion in doing so through React Native.
In this interview, Adam also expresses his thoughts on modern computing, creating building tools for developers and the challenges that come with the task.
ReactVR
Experimenting with ReactVR — Michaela Lehr on How to Get Started
Michaela Lehr, an Angular developer, became interested in React because of the recent developments in ReactVR. ReactVR is was made for creating VR applications using React, allowing developers to build in VR with ease.
There is a lot of code involved with writing writing traditional VR applications, thus making it difficult to keep track of things and see what’s happening with your code. However, with ReactVR, everything is organized the way a React application would be and native components such as the VR button exist to make the overall VR app development process simpler.
To get started with ReactVR, you can download a zip package with the code or install it via npm. The docs provide a scaffold for sample projects so you can easily try it out yourself!
Peggy Rayzis
Augmenting Your React Development using Open Source Projects with Peggy Rayzis from MLS
With a small team at Major League Soccer (MLS), Peggy Rayzis has the opportunity to work on a lot of the UI implementation using React. MLS uses quite a few open source projects to build their applications.
Data visualisation, more specifically, stats visualisation, is a major focus at MLS. Since the team has a lot of data on the players, games, and game stats, they are constantly finding trying to find new ways to share the information with fans. One open source solution that MLS utilizes is Victory (by Formidable Labs). Victory is a library that is built on top of D3 made of reusable, modular, and composable React components. The library is almost completely cross-platform and ninety-five percent of the code can be reused between react and react native.
React-Native-Create-Bridge is a CLI tool which automatically generates bridge modules. This is an open source project Peggy developed at MLS. As she states in npm, if you’re a JavaScript developer writing your first lines of native code or a more experienced developer looking to eliminate boilerplate from your React Native workflow, this tool is for you.
Interact is another project that Peggy not only uses, but contributes to. Interact is an open source Electron application which allows you to create code cells or markdown cells and run them inline. It’s similar to Jupyter Notebook but has a better user experience.
The React open source community is fast-paced and constantly changing with releases such as React-Navigation, React-Native-Web, Exponent, and React-Router v4.
If you enjoyed reading this article and would like to stay updated on the changes and new releases in React, you can find more information here.
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