I didn’t (and won’t) have talks about React this year. Talking is a nerve-wracking experience and I don’t have new interesting content for a talk either yet. There is one funny thing though.
I did a JSConf Iceland talk a year and a half ago: reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/0…. That's when we introduced Concurrent Mode (called Async Mode back then) along with Suspense for the first time. The goal of this talk was to explain the long-term vision and motivate lifecycle changes.
We usually don't talk about stuff that's still in research. But we knew this vision required a significant buy-in from the ecosystem. We needed to explain why some lifecycles are becoming "unsafe", and why we're spending time and effort on this work and not something else.
The upside of this choice was that ecosystem as large has moved away from many unsafe patterns. There are even new apps that were written with StrictMode on from the beginning. (Which doesn't find all issues but gives a good starting point.) Same for many third-party components.
To me, that alone was worth explaining the direction early. Even it was arguably too early. I had to say "this API will change" every other minute. But I think explaining where we were going was worth it. The ecosystem is much more ready as a result now.
Here's the funny bit. I dug up those demos which relied on a bunch of hacks, definitely-wrong APIs and some smoke and mirrors. Rewrote to Hooks while I was at it (imagine, Hooks weren't even a thing when I made those demos). And ported them to real APIs we're now using in prod.
Those real APIs *needed* Hooks to make sense. Part of the reason we couldn't figure out the real APIs was *because* we didn't have Hooks at the time. Of course we couldn't see that. We were just confused about their possible final shape.
Now it's so bizarre to see it coming together. In those demos, I'm making < 20 line changes. But I could never see *those* particular changes coming. It took almost a year of production usage for @sebmarkbage to figure out both how they should work and what they should look like.
@sebmarkbage There are still parts that don't quite add up for me. But they're getting smaller and smaller. To me, that's really exciting to see.
It's fair to wonder whether people would be excited about these features as much as I am. I don't know. We seem a bit alone in this direction.
It's fair to wonder whether people would be excited about these features as much as I am. I don't know. We seem a bit alone in this direction.
