As React developers, we often spend a lot of time building User Interfaces (UI) for the end-users of the application. As our application grows, so does the complexity of creating new components such as buttons, menus, headers, footers, and so on!

Recently, I read Caelin Sutch’s article on how he fell in love with Chakra UI for React apps. Chakra is also one of my favourites and in this article, I will cover some of my other favourite libraries.

Bulma CSS

Today, Git is the de-facto version-control tool for most software engineering projects. Of course, there are alternatives such as Mercurial and Apache Subversion. However, Git has emerged as the true winner in this version-control ecosystem.

Check out this graph from Stack Overflow Trends to understand how the version control systems fared over time.

So you have completed your React app and you are looking to host it somewhere. Did you know you can use Amazon AWS S3 to host your React apps? It’s relatively easy, low-cost and quick to deploy.

Let’s get started!

Prerequisites

Before we go into hosting, let’s get the administrative setup done. Make sure the following are completed:

You have a AWS Account: Sign up for a AWS account here: https://aws.amazon.com/resources/create-account/

Create a AWS User: In the AWS Console, go to the IAM tab, and go to the “Users” section on the sidebar.

Click on “Add User” and check “Programmatic access”.

React is one of the most popular frontend libraries used to create User Interfaces today. The code is based on JavaScript and usually, when writing React code, there is a lot of leeway in terms of how you write it. However, this freedom can also translate into a lack of standardization and poor code quality.

For starters, check this article in which Caelin Sutch offers some great tips on React best practices. In this article, I will build on these tips and explore other best practices which can help you write cleaner and more effective code.

Once again, the following…

So you have completed the development of your application and now you are ready to make it live. You choose to host your application on AWS and your thoughts naturally move towards the scalability of your app. Thinking of which you ask yourself, “If my app is going to be popular, there are going to be thousands or even tens of thousands of requests. How can I prevent overwhelming my servers?”

Let’s understand the capabilities AWS offers through Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and the various types of load-balancing.

What exactly is ELB?

Before we dive into the capabilities, let’s explore what is ELB in…

Let’s take a look at how we can deploy a Node.js application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB). EB is not exactly the most straightforward platform and it may take you a couple of hours to figure out how things work. This short and handy guide aims to simplify that for you. Let’s deploy our app in 10 minutes!

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Elastic Beanstalk is an excellent platform provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help deploy our applications and scale them. You can deploy apps built on various languages or frameworks such as Java, .NET, PHP, etc. We have chosen Node.js …

React hooks provide an excellent way for writing React components without ever defining a class. Instead, we undertake a functional approach to creating components. This allows our code to be more modular as we are no longer dependent on lifecycle methods to split them up, but rather we split components by their use case and purpose.

If you are new to hooks, be sure to check out the overview of hooks here.

@sdolidze has published an excellent in-depth article titled “The Iceberg of React Hooks” where he covers level by level the various hooks offered by React. …

When it comes to building frontend applications, we as developers, are simply spoilt for choice. From Angular to React to Vue to Svelte, there are just thousands of libraries and frameworks to choose from. I have been a loyal React developer for a long time now. Even then, every time I built a React app, I had to do face the same confusion on what libraries I should be using for the app.

My typical thoughts as I develop yet again another React app:

“Is it going to be Bootstrap or Bulma?”

“Urgh, I need to setup ESLint again!”

“I…