Weekend Reading

Hello folks!

Another week come and gone, and the tech world is still abuzz with GPT-4. Though it does seem to have calmed down a bit doesn't it? 😅

In other news, bit of a hiccup for GitHub this week as they had to roll their SSH private key after accidentally exposing it in a public repo, yowch. Twitch layoffs continued in a horrendous fashion.

Still, plenty of React and JS news to keep us sidetracked. Grab your drink, pull up a chair, lets have us some weekend reading!

Gajus points out a quick tip to make our DX easier with TypeScript. I can't believe how many times I've been sent to the type definition files rather than the proper code, when it's such an easy fix!

Seb posed a question on variable naming and whether you should avoid one letter names. 219 replies, and 210k views. We apparently care a lot about our variable names! So why is it so hard? 😅

Dominik notes that React Query v5 is just around the corner! There's some neat stuff in this release but I also love the object properties by default, and switching back isLoading/isInitialLoading.

Daishi has published a learning "course" for Zustand v4. As he notes, it's such a small library that he's released it fairly cheap.

Tim, the lead from Vercel, announces that create-next-app will now ask if you want to get started with Tailwind CSS instead of CSS modules. This got mixed reactions on Twitter, as it alwasy does when someone mentions Tailwind, but this seems like a nice DX improvement to me. You still don't have to use it if you hate it that much.

Dan is still being given grief about RSC's from a lot of folks on Twitter. It's a difficult spot to be in, because it's brand new and they want to gauge how best to implement it, and not all the pieces are in place yet. I love this summary from Dan Jutan of Astro and Solid.

PlayWright released 1.32 this week, which brought with it UI mode and time travelling debug, akin to Cypress. Earlier they made React Testing Library a first class citizen, and this could now mean it's well worth a look if you weren't enjoying Cypress, or wanted to try it on a new project.

This Week In React

My top picks for TWIR:

Pretty neat mapping of all the available React APIs with some background reading behind them. Interesting way to document this information, hope to see more of it!

Brad writes about a list of React's more eccentric hooks, with a few common ones that shouldn't be used all that much thrown in too. No surprises useEffect makes the list, which I feel gets overused as an easy escape hatch quite a lot.

Both Vite and Prettier had some new releases this week. I don't think there's anything earth shattering here but it's nice to see some TS 5.0 support in Prettier already.

There's an interesting read about signals vs observables on the builder.io blog this week, which is fairly topical given I've been diving into React Query lately. Didn't pay too much attention to the signals hype as I had too much on, but this is a nice rundown for anyon who missed it.

Josh wrote about his feelings on AI and the future of development. Definitely match his sentiment that AI isn't going to be getting people fired anytime soon, but it can be a huge help if used properly.

See you next week!