December 2nd was filled with fun as Adjust Frontend engineers attended React Day Berlin! Here we’d like to capture some of the highlights from the conference. There were many great talks given and we won’t be able to mention every single one of them, but all recordings are available at GitNation portal.
Tooling
Bun’s builtin JSX transpiler, hot reloads on the server, JSX prop punning, macro API, automatic package installs, console.log JSX support, 4x faster serverside rendering and more make Bun the best runtime for building React apps. Bun is still not production ready, but they have raised the expectations a lot! Recording.
Turbopack: Rust-based successor to Webpack for all Rust enthusiasts among us, Turbopack is backed by the Webpack creator himself. Recording
Another interesting one was esbuild which looks like a very promising bundler option. Unfortunately, module-federation is not on the roadmap, but esbuild appeals as a bundler of choice if MFE architecture is not on the table. Recording – many other interesting tools were mentioned in the talk.
Image by Jonny Burger
React
Ever wanted to build a browser extension? You can do so with React! A reminder of cool things we can do on the browser level. Recording.
Wait, React Is Multi-Threaded? Apparently, we can use workers as hooks; good to know! Recording; GitHub link: useWorker
“The Weird Things About React” talk covered a lot, it was nice to learn how the React.FC type evolved over the years and how to make TypeScript always nudge you not to forget to return that cleanup function from useEffect. Recording
General
Monorepos is a hot topic in the TypeScript/JavaScript community these days, but getting a high performing monorepo setup from the ground up can be challenging. The benefits mentioned in the talk sound quite solid, we’ll be keeping an eye on Turborepo to see how it evolves. Recording
Every team has to address refactoring and tech debt. It was nice to discover that the approach we applied in our teams matches with what has been covered within “Fighting Technical Debt With Continuous Refactoring” talk. Recording
While we’re talking refactoring, another article to check out – Refactor Code in Your Lunch Break: Getting Started with Codemods
Closing thoughts
Attending React Day Berlin was a very educative and fun experience, it was also cool to be there as a team and have those post-talk discussions. It was great to catch up with all the new and shiny tech and recent frontend evolvements! We’re looking forward to attending and learning more in 2023!