Most developers in South Africa want to work with React and Angular - but don’t yet!
Outside of just figuring it out for yourself through trial and error, one of the best ways to pick up new skills is to learn from those who already have the experience.
Here are our top guides on React and Angular from the blog to help you get started:
How to Set Up an Angular Structure for Your App, Albert Janse van Rensburg
Picking up new technologies can seem like a hefty endeavour, but is often actually worth the time; learning “new tricks” like the Flux Pattern (implemented by Redux implementations such as ngRx for Angular) can be both simple and powerful. This particular state management trick helps to move all the bits and pieces of state to a single, abstracted store that makes managing state as easy as pie.
Albert Janse van Rensburg, full-stack software developer, shares his guide on how you can get started with Redux and why it’s so valuable.
Achieving Live Reloading Between React Apps and a Shared Library, Lunga Sizani
When developing a shared component library for use across multiple React applications, it’s hard to see your changes across those applications. However, having live reloading in a development environment for imports from a shared component library can speed up development.
Lunga Sizani, Software engineer at 2U, covers some of his learnings in building this setup with React apps from scratch.
The Secret Language of React Application Design, Robert Herbst
Many people use React without embracing functional programming concepts and patterns. Software developer Robert Herbst has found it incredibly useful to adopt functional thinking when using React, since it is declarative and describes the user interface as a function of state. In so doing it empowers a fundamentally different way of creating GUI applications that isn’t always obvious to beginners.
In this article, Robert shares how embracing functional thinking has been of benefit to him while building React applications.
How DAN.com Uses the DAN React Pattern for Faster, Easier Development, Christian Vogel
Christian Vogel, Software and Product Engineer at DAN.com, says that creating their own React pattern at DAN has helped them streamline their software development. In short, it removes the need to make state management a priority, which not only makes Christian’s coding faster, but also — he says — more fun.
In this podcast conversation, he shares what the DAN React pattern looks like on a component level, how it’s set up, the practical impacts it’s had on his team’s workflow, and some things to consider when setting up your own React pattern.
Reactifying OfferZen
The first iteration of OfferZen’s frontend stack consisted of server-side rendered html, jquery and handlebar templates. Although this worked quite well for us in the early days, we started running into problems as the complexity of the product increased and the team grew.
A few years ago, we decided that we wanted to move away from server-side rendering and decouple, as far as possible, the frontend from the backend. This article describes the approach we followed to migrate our frontend to React.
Configuring “Effect”-ive Communication with Angular, ngRx and SocketIO, Albert Janse van Rensburg
Having set up Redux, the next challenge you might face is effectively communicating changes from the outside world to your frontend application: Rather than having to manually ask every time something changes, we want to defer responsibility to the server so that it automatically updates and notifies you of changes.
Albert Janse van Rensburg, full-stack software developer, gives a tutorial to explain why, and guides you through configuring that communication using Redux effects and web sockets.
Switching from Native to Progressive Web Apps - and When I Wouldn’t, Kgotsofatso Kgang
Picking a solid platform for your business’ app is a complicated decision. Many app developers get stuck with a platform that requires undesirable maintenance effort, and falter on delivering new features. Although native apps can offer advantages that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) currently don’t, they aren’t always the best choice.
Kgotsofatso Kgang, founder of Neighbourdo, explains why his startup decided to switch from “native” to “progressive,” and provides a guide to creating your own first PWA.
Would you like more insights into current tech trends? Check out our latest State of the Developer Nation Reports for South Africa and the Netherlands:
