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Discussion on: I've hit a brick wall. How do I progress as a React Dev and other confusions.

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Mike Bybee • Edited

Take these steps:

  1. Breathe. You can do this.
  2. Remember that it's just JavaScript. Focus on REALLY learning that, and your React obstacles will become much easier to get past.
  3. Don't obsess over SOLID or especially DRY (if you're in too much of a rush to abstract what appears to be duplicate code, you may miss some critical edge cases - but also focus mostly on functional components and hooks so you're not repeating the same class methods over and over again).

TypeScript is good to learn to for getting a job, but dangerous if you rely on it as a crutch, a replacement for a solid understanding of JavaScript qua JavaScript. That type "safety" goes out the window in runtime, after your code is transpiled to JavaScript. See step 2 above, and take it to heart. Personally, I hate that so many people are imposing TS (and all the extra learning curve that comes with it) on less experienced devs (who you should be encouraging to learn JS as it is - loosely and dynamically typed), especially when you can achieve the same things with proper JSDoc comments and ESLint (and even get the same Intellisense if you enable ts-check for JavaScript in VS Code), without all the unnecessary, nonstandard syntax.

Even if you don't use it (I haven't in my own projects for over a year now), Redux is good to learn for getting a job (I'd guess about 50-75% of React roles are still using Redux) and because it relies on so many concepts that translate to programming in general (reducers, middleware, pure functions, etc.).