Learn React by building a web app

– As far as I understand, Redux was intentionally made to be low-level and unopinionated, with the idea that other libraries would build on top of it. That has not really borne out and it actively makes adoption extremely painful. Everyone just uses Redux directly in their apps. As a result, adopting Redux on every team I've ever been on has been a painful process of figuring out how to fill in the blanks that Redux left out. Like how to handle async actions and side effects, how to name action creators, where to put connect()ed components, etc. And the result never feels great.

– Related to the above: it's extremely telling that I can't name a single library of reusable Redux actions/reducers/etc. Despite attempts to define things like "ducks", and there being hundreds/thousands of reusable React components published, there are none for Redux that anyone has ever paid any attention to. Because of the batteries-not-included philosophy, you pretty much just can't share your Redux code, because different apps might be building on vanilla Redux in too disparate a fashion with whatever middleware they chose. That's why I'm expecting the new Context API to displace a fair amount of Redux usage: because publishing reusable Context libraries is going to be brain-dead simple compared to reusable Redux.

– Developers just don't get what they should connect() and how to design their components, and Redux doesn't really offer them much guidance. As an example, every single day I have to mention in code reviews that something like a "loadProducts" prop does not make any sense on something like a "SearchButton" component, just because our Redux action happens to be named "loadProducts" – an "onClick" prop that just happens to be mapped to "loadProducts" in connect() makes much more sense. But devs are lazy and just end up giving components a bad design with a bunch of props that wouldn't make sense if Redux were not involved. Most of my code reviews contain the words "design your component's API without even thinking about Redux yet!"

There are more, but those are the main issues. btw, thanks for all the hard work you do!

I've been using it the past 6 weeks and super happy with it. I'm sticking with the hyperscript form of it, but you can use JSX if you want.

[0] https://github.com/chenglou/react-motion

With snapshots, while not perfect, they do catch a lot and are easy to do (and more importantly, easy to update when things change). React components are relatively easy to further test with enzyme and jest.

Without a focus on instructing people how to do testing, people never bother.