July 2024: The Future of React Looks Brighter all the Time
Between updates to the React Compiler, and new strategies to make CSS in JS work with React Server Components, we've all got a lot to look forward to.
Hi all,
I feel like I was just writing the monthly newsletter summary for Paige Codes for the month of June, and yet here we are again at the end of July already. To say the summer is going by in the blink of an eye is somewhat of an understatement.
Whereas last month I was in the midst of a heatwave, this month we’re getting rain showers at least once a day (often times more!). The grass is still green thanks to the frequent rain, but the humidity…
I hope you’ve got clear skies and a pace of life that you can keep up with wherever you may be. And without further ado, on to the news in tech.
This month, I caught up with Sathya and Joe from the React Core team for an update on React Compiler, and met one of my web dev heroes Josh Comeau to talk CSS in React Server Components (who is just as nice in person as he comes across in his writing).
It was a great pleasure for me to host a second LogRocket interview with two of the React Core team members, Sathya Gunasekaran and Joe Savona, about the latest updates to the React Compiler, an innovative new tool designed to simplify and optimize development workflows in React.
I interviewed these two almost exactly a year prior about the progress on the React Compiler (then known as “React Forget”).
And I was truly honored to also interview indie hacker Josh Comeau (who you may know from his course CSS for JS Developers and The Joy of React.
I’ve been a fan of Josh’s for years because of the great blog articles he’s written about all sorts of web development topics, the touches of whimsy his personal site is sprinkled with, and the fact that he comes across as just a very good guy.
And when I interviewed him about strategies for using CSS with React Server Components, I was not disappointed. He is extremely knowledgeable, he is very thoughtful, and he is just as nice as his writing conveys.
I learned a lot from both interviews, and it makes me very excited and optimistic for the future of React.
My blog series on JavaScript ES6 features continued this month with a new installment on default function parameter values.
Although it’s been several years now since the ES6 syntax debuted in JavaScript, there are still plenty of developers for whom JavaScript is a mystery — or at the very least, a little less understood.
A few years ago, I wrote a bunch of posts about ES6 features I use regularly to provide short, in-depth explanations about various improvements to the language that I hope will inspire readers to build more cool stuff.
In past months I covered some basics like var, let and const, and arrow functions. This month I got to default function parameter values and how they can save your bacon if a function is expecting an argument to be passed in, but doesn’t receive one. Default parameters can work in traditional functions, they can work in arrow functions, they are just plain useful all around.
Each month in this newsletter, I’ll highlight the next blog post in the series, but if you’re curious you can always go to my website and type “ES6” in the blog page search.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of August,
- Paige
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