If you're a mid-level React developer looking to become an advanced React developer, this post is for you!
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While I agree with most of the advice given, some are subjective and opinionated and do not necessary reflect universally accepted best practices.
For example, I prefer SASS/LESS over css-in-js. But again, this is my own subjective preference. Similarly, I prefer to use Elm, ReScript or PureScript if I'm overly concerned with the correctness of the app. Otherwise, (JS + tests) is better than TS for fast development and less overhead of maintaining a mountain of TS types that often leak bugs anyways.
Also, it would be better to zoom out and think why React.memo helps. Perhaps restructuring the react tree would make several instances of React.memo redundant.
I know I'm in the minority but I hate hooks because of all the pitfalls one needs to remember when using them, especially when there are nested 2 or more levels deep. Check out RefractJs; no need for hooks. HoCs are better because they're a universal pattern; not a library's API.
I have been thinking this as well. I would only want to use rescript or elm, or just js. Of those three options, I am slightly leaning towards js with tests because I don't have to deal with any special tooling. If elm gains more momentum, or rescript launches a huge framework developed in rescript, I would make those my default. I am disappointed that Elm hasn't won (yet?). (I very rarely build small front ends, so my opinions here don't have a lot to back them up).
I have also been thinking about leaving business object data as json (e.g. package.elm-lang.org/packages/1602...) instead of converting to records, when using elm or rescript, because I think most business objects will eventually want some user defined fields.
I recently started a JS project and had trouble with conflicting versions of npm dependencies. It took me a day to balance the correct versions and still couldn't use the latest version if one of the core dependencies. At some point, I was very tempted to switch to Elm because dependency management is easier. I just didn't want to handle encoding/decoding of JSON; lazy 😂
I would have just used an escape hatch like package.elm-lang.org/packages/1602...
💯😂
Elm is my go-to for a nice developer experience. For me it has "won".
I let my IDE (Atom/elmjutsu) generate decoders/encoders for me. You can use korban.net/elm/json2elm/ if your preferred editor doesn't support generating them. I don't recommend circumventing decoders.
I only decode/encode the data I need. Sometimes (usually) I want my model to look different that the data in the API, so I make tweaks for that. Decoding even helps me find flaws in my assumptions on data coming from the API too!
There's elm-graphql if that's an option for you.
Css in js and typescript are best practices and every day more companies are joining the bandwagon asking for these skills. While I do personally also like to take a backseat in the bandwagon, css in js and typescript are quickly becoming industry standards (typescript already is) and you're going to hurt your career if you refuse to become proficient in these skills.
Claiming css-in-js and TS are best practices is incorrect. However, claiming there's momentum behind these technologies is correct.
TS, in my opinion, is the new Java. It'll build a massive pile of horrible codebases that future developers will have to maintain. It's an opportunity as well as a curse 😅. Pure FP languages with clear FFI are better for guaranteeing the correctness of apps.
I've worked extensively with existing codebases in both Java, Typescript and Javascript. Your claim that Typescript is the new Java is just a little bit ridiculous tbh... If you want to make such a crooked comparison, Typescript is more comparable to C# than Java. The pile of horrible codebases you talk about, I've seen them but they were all in Javascript.
css-in-js is horrible ,stop your self please.
TailwindCSS is the shit. css-in-js is the worst and performs really badly.
I agree with everything. However I still love hooks💯
God damn! using TS as "good practice"... The post was good since I read such a stupid thing.
I encourage you to learn JS properly instead.
We've tools in JS to use as we need them, it's not the most used programming language around the world just by chance.
facts
Do you want type checking? Simply add
// @ts-checkat the top of your file, VSCode will handle it for you in dev time[*1], all you need to do is to add JSDoc to your functions/methods and variables, which is one of the most important best practices: Document your code.
Do you want types and function/method inference? Again, JSDoc.
Better intellisense? Guess what... JSDoc.
Do you want to produce a maintainable code? Apply SOLID and KISS patterns.
Since we're talking about react, you should know about prop-types as well, more useful than type-checking if you take in mind the context of React[*2].
About data fetching libraries, there's fetch API by default in JS, that can handle ALL existent features that HTTP requests provide (moreover fetch API is coming to Node as well). Why adding an additional one?
One important (and real) good practice is to add the minimum amount of third party libraries into your project. This makes your project more robust, faster to build/deploy and usually more secure.[*3]
personal opinion
I find styled-components useful and probably the best option for several reasons (everything is a component, no unused CSS, much cleaner than tailwind, sass/scss capabilities by default, JSX inside styles definition, it can handle JS props (usefull for interactions that CSS alone can't handle and you can place it on a different file).
I like to have 3 files in each component folder, those are, as example:
myComponent.js
myComponent.styles.js
myComponent.utils.js
Which I guess are self-explanatory (ask me if you want detail).
[*1] Meaning that you don't need to add TS to your project and waiting the extra build time, it will work, let's say, in runtime, while you are developing instead. 0 time wasted and same type-checking than adding the huge TS lib to your project, isn't it amazing? 🤗
[*2]Most part of the logic should be in the backend. You should only handle interaction logic in the frontend, which makes easier to scope everything where it belongs so you can swap your backend or frontend without the hell of a code with heavy coupling.
It may seem that React will exist forever but people that is migrating from JQuery-UI maybe thank the same back those days 😂
[*3] By robustness meaning that you don't need to update your project each time a lib changes it's way-to-work, relying on language API (if it suits the project needs) is so, usually better.
By secure I mean that the probability that a third party deals to a security hole is higher than using the language API itself as a general rule of thumb.
I find faster to build/deploy as self-explanatory.
Learning JS properly as you said and using Ts are by no means exclusive. You write to not use Ts but then immediately suggest to use ts-check pragma. While JSDoc is powerful tool, it shouldn't be used for typechecking your code, this again is thanks to TS extracting some info from your js documentation and by no means is a solid solution for larger projects.
Also about the data fetching libraries, you clearly didn't understood what they are for. React Query isn't there to replace fetch, it uses fetch to smartly and effectively work with async data.
Sure it's not, I totally agree with this. I'm not editing the previous comment to keep things as they are, I should have been avoided the word "instead" at the end or communicate it on a different manner.
I said that that if you want type-checking for any reason you can simply use this instead loading the entire TS as dependency in your project.
¿Why not? JSDoc annotations live in comments, rather than directly in syntax, which I prefer but it's totally opinionated, you can choose one or another or none of both and it will be Ok if it suits your project needs.
This post is about good practices, so my comment is targeted to avoid opinionated stuff into good practices rather than discussing the usefulness of a given library.
We need to take apart what we "like" or what we found "useful" or what it worked "well for us in a specific use-case" so we can differentiate what are actual good practices than what are our preferences.
Do you prefer TS for some reasons? It's OK, go for it. Do you prefer to avoid using TS? It's equally good, go ahead. The same applies to fetching libraries.
Is strong typing things good? Sure it can avoid runtime errors, but it's not the only way to reach the same.
Saying that TS or fetching libraries are "good practices" is just so out of the reality that it simply can't fit. By all means, best practices are not language specific, just for that reason adding TS or a given lib is just an opinion (to which you can agree or not, but that's not the point of discussion).
The reason we can tell what is a best practice is because we can see Typescript winning massively in popularity. We can see code written in Typescript failing much less frequently in production. We can see junior developers learning much faster how to write proper testable code.
Javascript spawned all these cowboy devs who started their own religion of writing proper code in Javascript (with 1 follower per religion), because the language itself has no opinion about what proper code is. There's a reason why all those "tools" you mentioned earlier exist now. Typescript is the natural evolution of some of those tools.
And yes, best practices can definitely be language specific. For example its best practice to use proper indentation in Typescript, in Python your code simply doesnt work and in other languages like cobal appearantly its best practice to not use indentation at all :P
That script is looking good but then you realize that JSDoc exists sice the 90s and that Doc capabilities are in almost every language...
I'm always at the JS side here in Dev community for a good reason. You defend TS with personal preferences rather than analysing properly the project needs.
I would prefer, to use TS in a Node backend which provides business logic but I find a non-sense adding it to the auth service (which will simply validate tokens from Google IDP for example).
I would probably avoid adding TS to a microservice that aggregates 2 third parties (you'll not get strong typing in runtime anyway so all you need to do is a prop map, and the result will be the same with vanilla JS than with TS, probably you'll add some validation library like Joi).
So no, we can't tell that using TS is a good practice, as every tech, it's good where it has sense. I'm tired to tell that there's no single tech to rule them all, and that we are working in a Science field. Adding personal preferences to your projects harm them on a way or another. I.e.
Not using TS when you should makes the product less robust.
Adding TS where you shouldn't expands your dev times for any reason.
C'mon, you can find proper non-opinionated definitions on best practices around the Internet.
We were talking about React projects here. The Wikipedia page you link holds the definition of what best practices are. It does not keep an extensive list of all best practices used in the field, nor does it claim that anything not mentioned there is not a best practice.
Improve software quality is what Typescript does, especially for React projects.
This is an opinion, not a definition. Assuming that TS improve the software quality we can extrapolate that and say that Java (which includes the "strong sides" of TS by default) improve software quality and by extension all Java code has quality.
I worked 4 years using Java and I'm confident to say that this is not true.
Strong typing and so gives your code robustness which is absolutelly not the same than quality.
SOLID principles, design patterns (when they fit), documentation, testing, good naming conventions etc are things that improve software quality and some of them also add robustness.
Moreover TS shines when dealing with complex logic (as it adds robustness, either be with ts-check pragma or adding TS into your project) and you are not supposed to add complex logic in the frontent (it adds coupling and makes hard to migrate to a new frontend technology when react dies in a future) so I would rather say "specially in complex Node services" instead "specially in React", where you will get interaction logic only.
I'm just going to ignore the absurd comparison with Java (The way in which Typescript deals with type safety is completely different from Java) and only reply to the more sensible part of your reply. SOLID is great, especially the parts that carry over to functional programming, yes design patterns, documentation, testing, good naming conventions, completely agree and there is zero reason why you cant do this in Typescript. The second part of your reply... Thats not the point of Typescript, the point of Typescript is that I can trust that when a team member writes some code or some intern writes some code and after a while I have to make changes to that code, I'm not confronted with a big mess of different styles of coding and variable declarations that are changed all over the place, holding values that I cannot predict. Typescript has made my life a lot easier and less filled with fixing nonsense bugs and typos. If you want to dismiss that as a personal opinion, go right ahead lol
I know that difference between Java and TS, but making the assumption that TS always deals to a quality code is absurd in the same way.
I agree with you in most parts to be honest, it's just that, to add objectivity into the equation, you can get the same with JSDoc definitions and using ts-check pragma instead loading the entire TS as project dependency.
Again, I don't mean to say that using TS is bad or any other thing, it's just that fanboying a tech makes you think that it's good for everyone in every situation and for each use-case that you have to face and that's simply not true.
To get the correct tech stack for a project you need to check different metrics; the specific use-case/s to cover, the future planning, the human resources available (quantity, seniority, previous experience), the overall experience of the team on each tech stack and so on.
Then, in a perfect world, all projects would have unit tests, e2e tests, good documentation, an up-to-date confluence with the acceptance criteria to review before refactoring something and a huge etc of things.
The real life for most projects is that business needs go first and it usually means "We need this done by [DEADLINE]" which leads inevitably to cut time in some of those things, so you need to choose.
Do you prefer extended dev time by using TS? Do you prefer to have unit tests? Do you enforce documentation?
There are different approaches that lead you to -almost- the same result, for example, if you take the approach of "everything is a component" in React, using propTypes is more flexible than strong typing your code, plus you add explicit definition of what is optional and what is required and so on, just to add an incomplete example.
It's not all black or white, it's not a "good practice", it's not a use TS or not use TS, it's a tech stack definition and it will be the correct one or not depending on those different metrics I add before and it may be a question on "how much TS do you want to imply in your project" and for which reason.
I'm adding 2 use cases from some months ago just to illustrate.
Real-time chat app with Node + React using Websockets
and persisting data in a MySQL database.
It was meant to be integrated inside a different webapp as stand-alone webapp.
React code is just an entry point to authenticate the user in context + the chat component (divided in two, the place where you type and the place where you read). Around 200 lines of code as much, you just deal with strings.
Node backend it's just the event emmiter, the persister (to store) and the reader (to get previous chat history), around 150 lines of code as much if you put the files together, again you just deal with strings.
There is no logical benefit of adding TS. You can fantasize with things like "if the project grows then...", "if bla bla... then" but the reallity is that this project will remain as is for it's entire life.
Service to handle bussiness logic
Between a React frontend and a headless CMS.
That's the objective truth about this regarding the metrics, but you seem like the one dev that cries at the back saying "but we HAVE TO use TS" (usually just because he's used to it and as a personal preference) and can't give any good reason for it to Architecture and Management people.
I don't know man, jsdocs, proptypes.. I see that too often as wishful thinking, because only one dogmatic guy of the entire team is keeping those up to date and consistent. Strict ts is more friendly for a mixed-level team because it puts less burden on Sr engineers during code review to always double check if "best practices" are adhered to (and reduces friction due to being code-blocked during the code feedback stage)
A codebase with outdated jsdoc/proptypes/etc brings a tear to my eye.
You can use a linter to ensure those are present and validate ts-pragma as well, so you can't have an invalid definition
Or you can not use all those things and just use one thing: Typescript :P
Sure it's an option that I follow depending on the use-case :)
Major error in your post: you centered your "personal opinion" header instead of aligning it to the top.
@mehyam 😂😂😂
It's an introduction 😆
I really don't agree with you on this one, writing jsDocs or PHPDocs is one of the biggest waste of time ever, in my opinion: when was the last time you read a useful comment in a jsDoc?
I think that all jsDocs do is either:
It's the first time in my life that I read something that "documenting your code is bad". You guys surprise me more every day 😆
Of course you need to think before writing a function, and as best practice you'll probably re-write this function splitting it in two or three because you forgot to apply the S on SOLID (single responsibility).
Remember that the first half of a developer job is to make the code work, the other half is to make it maintainable, readable, documented and tested.
Yes, good code doesnt need documentation. Read Clean Code by Martin Robert. If your code needs documentation, its not easy to read/understand and is therefor bad code.
That describes a concept not a reality. The maximum perfection in a team would be to understand each other's code to the perfection, all with the same level/amount of knowledge and working together for years.
In a real life project working in a team, usually you'll get different expertise levels, there's people rotation and you'll have to maintain the code for long time.
I can code a function composition inside my code and the junior will come and say "bruh, WTF". If we can take the time and resources to raise the seniority to a given "minimum" level for the project it would be fine (I guess, never saw it IRL)..
But even that, there's no single pattern or best practice other than documenting your code that can release you from the burden of remembering everything in a future stage.
Let's say you work 5 years in a project and someone new comes to it. Understanding what it does in the big picture is a matter of reading function names (if the codebase is good).
i.e.
getUserId(user)will obvious get the user ID, probably from a user object. If you use TS you can see that user ID is a number and that user param is a user object. That's all the knowledge you can take from the declarative part of the code.Usually you'll see something like:
Adding doc would be something like:
Isn't that beautiful?
Let's get a step further adding function composition:
Can everyone predict what will that do exactly without having to think for some seconds? I can honestly say that a quarter of my current team wouldn't.
Let's add Doc to it:
Isn't it better, faster and quickier?
So i've lost less than a minute to avoid others in the team not loosing a couple of them in a future.
And we just saw the declarative part, on the imperative part scoped in helpers and functions could be harder to catch up things quickly as they'll have procedimental code with conditions, loops and so on, and here is where doc shines most.
Clean code is a concept that was born from a shit ton of practical experience... Uncle Bob has what? 40 years experience in the field? And it's not like he's alone, or that the concept of clean code wasnt adopted and put in to practice for the past 14 years...
You can claim all you want... No junior developer is going to understand what your JSDoc comments really mean, or know how to use it properly themselves. With typescript they have no choice... But more importantly, they don't have to care at all because Typescript does type inference automatically and it will just tell them what they're doing wrong if they try to assign the wrong type to a variable or function :B no understanding JSDoc required and a bunch of other tools and VS code plugins that you need... I have the complete opposite experience than what you claim... The junior devs I have encountered found Typescript very easy to learn and use.
JSDoc, like PHPDoc is archaic, from a century before we had modern type systems and stems from Javadoc which is even more archaic...
I agree, the example you give is a horrible obfuscation of logic that you should not do at all. If someone changes what is returned by one of the functions in your composition and doesnt update the JSDoc for it, Javascript is going to crash in runtime and I would love for you to let a junior dev try to find and fix that runtime error with your function composition. If you work with 10 devs, I guarantee atleast 5 of them are not going to care much about updating code comments when they're writing code. I much prefer devs who try to write clean code, instead of trying to explain their mess with JSDoc.
So, to recap, you'll use TS always instead JS, isn't it?
I am using JS since TS is just superset of JS, but yes, for typesafety and to avoid a million runtime errors everytime you forget something, I will use TS until something better comes along.
So you took a decision based on other decisions you made before (learning TS and ignoring vanilla JS as much as possible).
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail.”
Taking in mind that TS does not check types at runtime and also knowing the context where you are working on (in this case React), where runtime errors are mostly due to some API error (the backend guy forgot to add some property, the swagger says that in this contract you should get a string but instead you got an integer and so on) you'll face exactly the same amount of runtime errors either using one thing or another but hey, those are your projects, not mine.
The amount of assumptions you make about my work experience with other languages shows how narrow minded you really are.
There are ways to avoid runtime errors from API changes, but i'm sure you have a very strong opinion about those tools as well and frankly I have come to the conclusion that its utterly pointless to discuss these things with you.
In terms of compile time, ReScript is lightning fast, if you ever want to dabble in it. I am not suggesting switching to it, it's just an interesting thing to try if compile speed is something that bothers you about typescript.
Just pointing out some things there 😆 Thanks for your comment, I'll check it out :)
I’m definitely no js purest (in fact I simply adore types and interfaces and abstract classes) but I think you’re absolutely right with your statements, especially concerning React.
The framework itself isn’t really ideal for especially complicated projects to begin with, and TS is just another build layer on top that isn’t really necessary if you’re comfortable with JSDoc.
I’m ALWAYS astonished that React documents don’t seem to bring up styled-components at all. I loathe how inflexible css-in-js is. It’s absolutely nonsensical if you’re building anything larger than a personal website or a series of detached components. Having a SASS or LESS is such a time saver, and really optimizes how you can use css
Or instead of learning all your "tools in js", you could just learn Typescript properly because it has all those things built in :)
Following the same logic you could just learn Kotlin and then transpile it into JS, as it has even more capabilities than TypeScript and you can also code native Android Applications, web services, gateways and so on with it running over the JVM which is better for complex computational tasks than JS is over Node.
Maybe you could just code in Rust and compile it to WebAssembly .
There's plenty of options if you really want to avoid digging deep in a programming language!
If you prefer to just scratch the surface, then you get tired for any reason and need a different challenge, go for it.
I'm pretty sure that more than half the people reading this didn't even know about JSDoc, I even got comments about how bad documenting your code is 😆
If your code needs documentation to be understandable, its bad. Highly recommend reading Clean Code by Robert Martin. Sure you could invent your own language and be a solo dev cowboy and nobody will understand what the hell you're doing, or you could just use whats already there and appearantly works for a large chunck of the dev population. JSDoc doesnt work, thats why nobody uses it except a very small group of preachers. And yes, I highly recommend that you dig a little deeper into Typescript until you understand that its not comparable to Java.
Wow I cannot believe you wrote this.
Talking about "// @ts-check" i don't know if you use the comment for some means but actually there is an options in the settings that enabled it by default for all javascript file.
Adding the TS pragma makes it work on any team member VSCode without having to check that they have it enabled in their IDE, so it's a convenience while working in a team.
make sense :)
God tier troll or ramblings of a madperson?
Great article, I agree with most of these points. Not too sure about using reducers for just arrays, since they also add a bit of complexity and boilerplate themself. I would say it helps if you can identify unique actions in your component tree that affect multiple parts of state.
One thing I noticed is that people try to come up with their own solutions while React has a somewhat opinionated solution for that problem. This mostly boils down to them trying to optimize prematurely or storing calculated values in state (leading to the problems you describe) - they think a rerender would be too expensive based on their gut feeling instead of actually measuring it.
I'm not a great fan of unit testing React related code (the internal state of your app), but for specific business logic it could make sense. I think Kent C. Dodds is on to something with his testing trophy - mostly write integration tests so you can verify the most important use cases of your app and try to avoid testing the internals.
Also, using testing library (with Cypress) was an eye-opener for me. Multiple times I tried writing a test using querying methods that test the interface based on what the user sees (aria role, form label, aria label, text, etc), but noticed I couldn't because there were no proper labels on my elements. By writing the test, the accessibility of my app improved as well! Win win!
Thanks Edwin. When I say "using reducers for arrays", I primarily am referring to the "I have an array of objects and the user can edit each object" use case. For a simple array of IDs, reducer is not really necessary.
I also love the testing trophy so I agree with you there!
@testing-library/cypressis an interesting topic... I have used React Testing Library and Cypress, just not together 😉I agree with everything, except the reducers. Although its good to stay up to date with a library like redux because of its widespread use, and using built in react hooks is definitely good advice. Personally I prefer more lightweight state management solutions like jotai and I hope to see a move away from redux in the industry.
This is a very professionally written article that benefits the dev.to community.
What are your thoughts on TailwindCSS? I've grown to prefer Tailwind over styled components.
I agree on the importance of Typescript. I recently worked on a large site with over a million dollars in monthly sales and it uses
.jsonly (not a single.tsxfile). In this regard, what differentiates an opinion from best practice. I think using TypeScript is best practice. Or is that an opinion?I'm definitely sharing this on Linkedin.
Self documenting code is a lie that I honestly thank the community was aware of since long time ago.
I've been using useState to handle most of my state in my React related project but I need to know more about how to handle state globally like using redux and the likes, can anyone recommend a good course for me to study?
The Redux Toolkit documentation has some good tutorials and guides for using Redux!
The other thing worth mentioning about reducers is to switch on state first than action (event). Most developers write them action first which means the event can be fired unconditionally. It even mentions this in the docs
redux.js.org/style-guide/style-gui...
Very helpful 🥳
A new JavaScript expert is born :)
I loved this post, I am trying to improve my level as a react developer and I really liked the tips, I will read it every week until I internalized them.
And the last advice - you don't switch to Vue.
Found the post mostly edgy but went along until the " Only use server rendering if you really need it ".
That has to be the worst tip ever :(