I had a hard time learning React.js, because it requires complex boilerplate setup, tooling and special application architecture such as Flux or Redux. After watching many intro videos or tutorials I wasn’t making progress until I decided to develop simple open source project

Learning React.js and Redux

There are so many open source projects out there that it’s hard to sort through them all.  Some of them are successful, some of them not so much. If we take all popular projects (meaning over 2-3 thousands of stars on github) - they all have easy-to-follow detailed documentation. It doesn’t mean documentation makes these projects more successful; it means it removes the friction for developers to try and use the project.

Power of technical documentation

React.js router is at version 2.0 as of now. It’s changing fast. So this may not work few months from now. I had the case where I wanted to create REST URLs but still re-use components where possible. That’s one of the selling points of React as a library. In my case I wanted to re-use form in the “new” and “update” pages

React.js route state name

Uploading files is one of the most common tasks performed by web developers. It’s a pretty simple operation when using PHP or other server side frameworks. However, it is not so straightforward when using Node.js, unless you understand how to user Buffer API for reading streams of binary files (i.e. uploading file content as binary code). Luckily for us, the Node.js community came up with a few solutions.

Uploading files with React.js and Node.js

The challenge arises when you need to add a piece of server side logic, like sending emails, uploading files, authentication, or storing some data to the database. In most cases, it doesn’t make sense to add a full blown server, which requires to be maintained and setup.

Send emails with Ember.js + Amazon SES + Firebase

If you just want to learn a new language I would recommend to decide what you’ll be doing and start by answering these questions

JavaScript