Join Carl Vitullo, Mark Erikson, and Matt Pocock as we break down This Month in React. A lot of news this month, with a major progress update from the React core team, TypeScript 5.0, and TC39 meeting news. We'll break down what's new in an hour-long conversation.

Rewrites! Everyone wants to do one, but the software industry is littered with examples of failed rewrites. Our host Carl Vitullo is joined by Mark Erikson and Sunil Pai to talk shop about what they’ve looked like in our careers, and how to help make sure they’ll be successful.

Sunil Pai has loomed large in the React ecosystem for years, working on the core team, and he’s now building https://partykit.io. Mark Erikson needs no introduction! He’s maintained Redux and Redux Toolkit for years, is currently building http://replay.io, and has been a fixture of the Reactiflux community since the early days.

Join us and we’ll help you avoid the worst of the many footguns when rewriting software.

Topics discussed:

Ankita Kulkarni is an engineer manager and educator with more than 10 years of experience as a software engineer, now teaching developers about the transition into management.

When Ankita became a manager, she had to find mentors to help her learn the subtle intricacies of being a successful manager. Now, she’s taking what she learned and teaching developers about what that transition looks like, and how to decide if that’s how you’d like to further your career.

Links referenced:

Topics discussed:

A documentary about React, produced by Honeypot.io, was released on February 10th, and Carl Vitullo spoke with two of the people instrumental in making it happen: Ida Bechtle, staff filmmaker from Honeypot; and Christopher Chedeau, whose contributions to the React and JS ecosystem are nearly innumerable — React, React Native, Prettier, Docusaurus, Excalidraw, and more.

We talked about the documentary itself, how it got made, and some other behind-the-scenes info — an unofficial “DVD commentary” for the documentary.

Josh Comeau is an indie hacker, educator, and long-time member of the React community. He has a brilliant way of intuitively explaining complex subjects, and we're excited to talk with him about content creation, his experiences being an independent educator, and his new course, Joy of React. We talked about his career, job hopping, content creation, RSI injuries, replacing "best practices" with "happy practices", and more!

Some links referenced in the conversation:

Mind Body Prescription

Maxim Heckel

Nanda Syahrasyad

Paradox of Expertise

Tejas has worked in developer relations for years at companies like Vercel, Spotify, Xata, and G2i, and is now an independent educator and content creator. He's a mentor, keynote speaker, and angel investor, and we're exited to talk tech! He's super interested in edge computing, Qwik, and React. 

He and Carl talked about why he's starting a company, not letting fear of failure stop you from trying, investing, and about keeping the focus in devrel on relationships.

Our host vcarl is joined by 3 employees of Wix to talk about the evolution of web development, developer tools, and open source:

Omer Kenet, Head of Product for Codux

Peter Shershov, Engineering Team Lead

Tom Raviv, Head of Developer Relations and Team Lead for Stylable.io

Wix has been making web development more accessible since 2006, and they're currently celebrating the release of their new project Codux, a visual IDE for React. We're excited to talk about the history of our industry and what we can learn from the golden age of frontend development.

Join the Reactiflux community

Read the transcript here

Matt Pocock is an independent educator building totaltypescript.com. Previously, he has been an employee of Vercel and Stately, and was a member of the XState core team. MapleLeaf is one of our resident TS experts and longtime server MVPs. Through our conversation, we discussed how Matt got active in open source, why he's drawn to "the weird parts" of web development, and why working as a voice coach set him up for success after transitioning to software engineering.

Join the Reactiflux community

Retsam19 and MapleLeaf are long-time Reactiflux MVPs who have spent countless hours helping out others in the community. Event MC'd by Carl Vitullo, and hosted on Reactiflux.

MapleLeaf and Retsam19 are two of our resident TS experts and longtime server MVPs. Both are active in the open source community as highly skilled engineers, and Retsam19 moderates the official TypeScript Discord server. Through our conversation, we discussed how we got our starts in software development and our first jobs, the value we've gotten from the online communities we're a part of (and how tools like ChatGPT might affect that in the future!), the evolution of the JS ecosystem with Bun and Deno, and more.

Some links referenced through the discussion:

Hofstadter's Law

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Refactoring UI

If you found this valuable, one way you can help support Reactiflux is through buying one of the books we recommend! Most of these links have affiliate trackers, so we receive a portion of each sale.

Join the Reactiflux community

Mark Erikson and Lenz Weber-Tronic are long-time Reactiflux members and maintainers of Redux. Event MC'd by Carl Vitullo, and hosted on Reactiflux.

Mark (@acemarke) has been primary maintainer of Redux for 6 years and led development of Redux Toolkit, which was a major step forward in usability for the ecosystem. He's approaching the end of his first year in a new role at Replay.io, a time-traveling browser debugger. Before that, he spent the majority of his career — over 13 years — at 1 company! 

Lenz (@phryneas) has been a software developer for 20 years, and has worked with Mark as a maintainer of Redux and Redux Toolkit since 2019. He contributed much of the TypeScript expertise that made RTK possible, and is the brains behind RTK Query. He's in the middle of changing jobs right now, from a consultancy in Berlin to Apollo, a well-known open source company.

We talk about maintaining an open source library (and the challenges of providing correct TypeScript types!), what a job search is like later in your career, and more. Some links referenced through the discussion:

Hyrum's Law

Learning and Using TypeScript as an App Dev and a Library Maintainer

Why React Context is Not a "State Management" Tool (and Why It Doesn't Replace Redux)

If you found this valuable, one way you can help support Reactiflux is through buying one of the books we recommend! Most of these links have affiliate trackers, so we receive a portion of each sale.