React Hooks

I’d like to keep this post short as I’ve just bought my first house with my girlfriend (I may write a short post about it later), so there’s still boxes everywhere & on top of that I’m still working full time from home, so I’m pretty darn busy to say the very least.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to talk about React, recently I’ve lead a POC in my current team where I’ve used React to essentially seek to replace a product that’s currently implemented via a third party, as there are many costs & politics associated.

I won’t name the third party provider, I don’t want to come across as saying they offer a bad product or anything like that, I just know that we can do it better! 👍

Anyway, we decided to go with React because it’s so lightweight, it’s powerful, free, etc. Not to mention that it seems to be so popular that most development teams are using React now. The last time that I used react on a serious level was when I was working for Inngot, I had continued to tinker with it during my time at Admiral, but they were more of a Java & Angular kinda team, I didn’t use it commercially speaking. While my team in Lloyds is currently focused on Java & Angular, we’re seeing an interesting shift, we’ve essentially agreed to use React & Node. Many reasons go behind this from finding new talent through to the market share that both these technologies have, it’s a longwinded subject matter.

Anyway, due to the fact that we wanted to use these technologies & I was the guy with the most experience in these technologies in my team, I decided to do a fairly large portion of the development. But I was shocked to see just how amazing React has become, between the context API & the reducer hook, I’ve just frown to love React that much more.

The main reason why I decided to start writing about React hooks is that it’s just so easy to write your own hooks, all you’d need to do is spend some time looking at useHooks & you can see just how powerful React hooks are. 🤯

If it weren’t for the power, speed & simplicity of using hooks, I don’t think I would’ve been able to deliver the MVP in time, there’s so much state management that goes on, it is actually quite a complex application. To be honest, I’m somewhat proud of how much I was able to do in such a short period of time. Given I had more time & more freedom, I’d probably have done several iterations of this POC, because I’d like to ensure that the application is as simplistic, elegant & easy to maintain as humanly possible! 😂

Anyways… Like I’ve said, I’m incredibly busy at the moment, so I’m going to draw this one to an end right away, I would love to talk more about hooks, maybe I’ll do so during a period where I’m not quite so busy. But for now, I wish you all a very merry Christmas & a happy new year! 🥂🥳🎆🎄