Hi everyone!

Great releases this week: Contentlayer, Remotion 3, Jest 28, Netlify Edge Functions…

A good diversity of React articles, including 2 related to cross-platform, a subject that interests me very much.

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Contentlayer is a new system that offers to manage the glue between your content (Markdown, CMS, Notion…) and your code. You define a schema, and it will validate/compile your content and efficiently generate a .contentlayer folder with TypesScript types, and the content ready to be imported directly into your app. This seems to improve build performance significantly (up to x2 even even with cold caches). The beta has an official Next.js integration reduces the amount of glue code. I recommend watching the intro intro video (5min) to understand how it works in a Next.js context. A new project by Johannes Schickling, also creator of Prisma, also working on the glue between code and DB.

Remotion allows you to create videos programmatically, with React (web) code and data/props. After 10 months of development, v3.0 has just been released (trailer) and the main new feature is the new support for serverless rendering on AWS Lambda, which allows you to scale, reduce costs, and produce videos much faster!

Interactive article to help fully understand the stale closure problem in React. If you use memoization and do not respect the ESLint exhaustive-deps rule, you risk introducing this type of problem in your codebase, and it is not always easy to debug!

An interesting feedback on rendering a React app in several windows via portals. There are advantages (a single state to control all the windows) but also some challenges to solve.

After two long years, App.js Conf is coming back as an in-person event! Meet the creators of React Native & Expo, learn from the best and simply have fun with other devs from all around the world! Our line-up is full of mobile development professionals ready to share their knowledge. See our amazing speakers here! 

In addition to the two-day conference, we also prepared full-day practical workshops! There are still some tickets left for two of our workshops:

You can now book the workshop tickets with a 20% exclusive discount for This Week in React subscribers! Use the code ThisWeekinReact20 or follow this link to book your spot. 

PS: I’m going there this year 😉

Retool is a new approach to building internal apps: we’ve unified the ease of visual programming with the power and flexibility of real code. Drag and drop a form together, and have it POST back to your API in minutes. Deploy instantly with access controls and audit logs.

Callstack engineers explain how to adopt React-Native for an existing app, with 2 different approaches: greenfield (full rewrite) and brownfield (incremental migration). Also evokes how to port a web application to React-Native.

Artem gives some ideas for cross-platform web/mobile development. He suggests using primitive components, and taking a web-first approach for DX reasons: developing in the browser and testing with Cypress, then verifying that the mobile app works.

Lots of cool things in this release! My highlights:

Christoph Nakazawa explains how to create a JavaScript bundler, based on some existing Jest packages. Reading JavaScript files, creating the dependency graph, the bundle runtime, final bundle assembly… A technical reading that greatly demystifies the internal workings of a simple bundler.

After a failed attempt (Edge Handlers), Netlify releases a new serverless @ Edge offer with its Edge Functions in beta, based on the Deno Deploy infrastructure, and thus more compatible with web standard APIs. This allows in particular to run React meta-frameworks using server-side code more optimally: Remix, Next.js (only middleware for now), Hydrogen, Server Components, Astro…

The creator of Qwik/Angular continues to question the hydration model of our server-side rendered SPAs, and pushes to adopt another more efficient model, based on “resumability”.