If you want to hire in this competitive market — Take-home projects are a lazy, stupid hiring process. If your recruiting strategy relies on them, then you are making hiring more difficult than it needs to be. Like the DVD and home telephone, take-home exams are obsolete. You could get away with requiring prospective employees to finish a take-home project…

An easy way to organize your next project — Setting up absolute imports is a great way to better organize your NextJS projects. Forget long, hard to follow relative imports that break during refactoring, absolute imports make it easy to manage your application as it grows. The Problem With relative imports, we have imports that look like this inside of our…

Make your components easier to read with these tips — When I write React code, I have one simple goal. I want to write code that’s easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to update. I want future colleagues, to be able to take my work and expand upon it. I don’t care if I add a few more…

Why your team should use NextJS instead of rolling your own ReactJS framework — One of the reasons why we as developers love ReactJS is that it’s an unopinionated small library built for creating interactive user experiences. Try comparing ReactJS to a library like Angular — React has no “one way” to handle routing, to handle data fetching, to handle global state, to handle…

Learn a framework if you want to advance your career — If you want to get a job as a Frontend Developer, you need to learn React (or another framework). It’s popular to push back against the popularity of frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue. Proponents of “vanilla JS” will argue that you need nothing more than good old HTML, CSS…

Three takeaways from three years working with RTL. — I have been working with React-Testing-Library daily for the last three years. Over this time, my approach to testing with RTL has evolved, and I’ve learned how to write better and more resilient tests. I’m often asked to help my coworkers write tests, and to debug their failing tests, and…

Make your own active link component with useRouter and TypeScript — One of the first components I create while making a new NextJS application is a NavLink component. This component wraps Next's next/link component and adds an activeClassName if that link is active. If you’ve worked with React Router before, you are most likely familiar with their NavLink component, and that’s…

Use ?? instead of || — Over the last six years, I have been lucky enough to help companies build complex and demanding web applications using ReactJS. What I love most about my work is that I’m constantly learning new things, making mistakes, and learning from them. Recently, I almost introduced a bug into our application…

Advanced data fetching patterns made easy with useSWR — When it comes to building complex React applications, useSWR is a blessing. It takes away all the complexity of storing and caching your API responses. Most of my applications no longer need global state management. Today I would like to discuss two advanced (and related) use cases for data fetching…