Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2021

When React state management is not enough, I use atoms

I'm a fan of Kent C. Dodds. He has an excellent blog , he holds office hours on Youtube  and he manages an active Discord community focused on helping developers make maintainable React apps. I especially appreciate the way he thinks about state management in React apps. It does not have to be so reliant on external libraries. React itself is a library for managing state, so why not depend on its built-in abstractions. On a React Native app I'm building, most (> 95%) of the state management is indeed done with the React primitives: useStates, Contexts, and Refs. It is a big pile of hook compositions, and that's the way I like it. If you are familiar with React and can read its documentation, you can understand the code. There are a handful of places where using the primitives fall short, though. In these spots, plain old React hooks would require excessive glue code and would ultimately be confusing. Also, skipping needless renders in components such as forms can be tric