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React itself has been around for 7 years, but the ecosystem around React is still developing. There isn't a straightforward answer that's universally accepted a

React itself has been around for 7 years, but the ecosystem around React is still developing. There isn't a straightforward answer that's universally accepted and without warts in terms of how to do server communication, how to manage state, how to smoothly implement routing in a way that avoids most of the navigation hiccups that SPAs run into, how to manage CSS, etc. There's certainly answers which seem promising for all of those areas, but it seems to me that in every React project I work in, "use React" is the easy part - it's the 50 other decisions that need to be made as a consequence of that first easy decision that waste a lot of time and energy.

wpietri 6y ago
This resonates for me. I'm mainly a back-end developer, but for a while I've been wanting to improve my front-end skills so I can do basic things myself. React has been the obvious choice for a while. But every time I say, "Ok, let's see what I need to learn to get started," which happens maybe once a year, I end up getting different answers. I would like React to get more boring. Because I'll never focus mainly on the front-end, I can't devote a lot of cycles keeping up with the latest trends. If I have to make 50 (or even 5) informed decisions every time I want to throw a little interface on something, I'll never get anything done.
- xtracto 6y ago
  I think SPA are overvalued. They are slow to load, clunky and the paradigm of loading "modules" is messy. I prefer web components and plain html /js .
- ng12 6y ago
  If you're just wanting to get your feet wet create-react-app is the right choice. Go strictly by their docs: they do a good job of leading you to third-party solutions when required. In a way React suffers from it's own popularity. For example Next/Gatsby can be confusing for new developers but they only exist because React is popular enough to have popular meta-frameworks focused on solving specific use cases.

wpietri 6y ago

This resonates for me. I'm mainly a back-end developer, but for a while I've been wanting to improve my front-end skills so I can do basic things myself. React has been the obvious choice for a while. But every time I say, "Ok, let's see what I need to learn to get started," which happens maybe once a year, I end up getting different answers. I would like React to get more boring. Because I'll never focus mainly on the front-end, I can't devote a lot of cycles keeping up with the latest trends. If I have to make 50 (or even 5) informed decisions every time I want to throw a little interface on something, I'll never get anything done.

xtracto 6y ago
I think SPA are overvalued. They are slow to load, clunky and the paradigm of loading "modules" is messy. I prefer web components and plain html /js .
ng12 6y ago
If you're just wanting to get your feet wet create-react-app is the right choice. Go strictly by their docs: they do a good job of leading you to third-party solutions when required. In a way React suffers from it's own popularity. For example Next/Gatsby can be confusing for new developers but they only exist because React is popular enough to have popular meta-frameworks focused on solving specific use cases.