React Survey, Hooks Revisited, and cloneElement

As mentioned last week, React is working on a major rewrite to its documentation, and needs your help. The survey is still open! If you use React, consider taking a few minutes and completing the React 2020 Community Survey.

Shoutout to Josh Branchaud for sending me this outstanding Reddit r/reactjs thread. Every React developer will find something useful here to ponder! Don’t miss u/dceddia’s response, which excellently summarizes the last few years of changes in the React community.

New releases of React came out this week, featuring support for the upcoming JSX transform. We covered this new feature in issue #19; check it out if you missed it. These new releases allow us to test out the feature today.

A new version of Webpack is live, after two years of smaller improvements. This release bundles (pun intended) these changes together, plus other breaking changes required to make them all work together. Check out the detailed release notes for more information.

As promised, here’s part two of this talk, presented by Dan Abramov at ReactConf 2018. In this section, Dan demonstrates Hooks side-by-side a class component, slowly building up the pitch from first principles. If you’re new to Hooks or still trying to grok them, this demo is masterful and highly relevant today.

Continuing our path into more advanced concepts, here’s cloneElement. From the docs: “Clone and return a new React element using element as the starting point. The resulting element will have the original element’s props with the new props merged in shallowly.” Think of this as a technique to intercept a child component while appending to its props.