Animating React UIs in 2025: Framer Motion 12 vs. React Spring 10
The Loading Spinner That Wouldn’t Spin in San José It was 11 p.m. in a Costa Rican co‑working loft. Daniela, a junior dev tuning in from Warsaw, DM’d me: “The spinner stalls the whole React page.” She’d wired a vanilla CSS keyframe that clashed with our Tailwind purge config. Ten minutes of frantic pair‑debugging later, we swapped the […]
Visual Consistency at Scale: Design Tokens & Theming in React with Storybook 9
Night‑Mode Panic in Medellín Picture this: it’s 9 p.m. in Medellín, and I’m pair‑reviewing a React PR from Carla in Sydney. Product just flipped the dark‑mode feature flag, but our header text turned midnight‑blue—perfectly camouflaged against the charcoal background. We’d changed the primary‑text token upstream, yet dozens of isolated components still referenced a hard‑coded color. With […]
Crafting Reusable React Component Libraries that Scale from Side‑Project to Enterprise
Boilerplate Déjà Vu in a Bogotá Café Last spring I was pair‑programming with Ana in Barcelona. We were on our third React landing page in as many weeks, copy‑pasting the same Button, Input, and Modal into yet another repo while battling low Wi‑Fi in a Bogotá café. A typo in one copy broke keyboard focus, sneaking […]
Making Your React App Multilingual: Practical i18n Patterns
Lost in Translation on a São Paulo Stand‑up At 7 a.m. I was demoing our React onboarding wizard to teammates in Munich when the Spanish copy showed German placeholders like %username% hat sich angemeldet. Cue puzzled faces and a scramble through GitHub. One tiny typo in our translation key cascaded across every language file. If we’d wired a robust internationalization (i18n) […]
React Error Boundaries: Why They Matter
A Crash Loop on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast A humid Tuesday evening in Santa Marta, I was pair‑programming with Diego in Lisbon on a React price‑tracking dashboard. Ten minutes before our demo, an innocuous currency‑formatter bug threw an uncaught error that blank‑screened the entire app. Our fallback spinner never appeared; the console screamed Cannot read properties of […]
Debugging React Apps with Chrome DevTools & React DevTools
A Phantom Re‑Render in Cartagena’s Heat I was mentoring Sofia, a junior engineer dialing in from Warsaw, while I sweated through an un‑air‑conditioned apartment in Cartagena. Her React chat app spiked the CPU every time a new message arrived. The component tree looked innocent; no obvious state bombs. We cracked open Chrome DevTools’ Performance panel, […]
End‑to‑End React Confidence: Cypress 14 in Action
Faulty Checkout at 2 a.m. in São Paulo A thunderstorm rattled the hostel windows while I screenshared with Priya in Mumbai. Our React storefront looked perfect locally, yet customers on staging couldn’t finish checkout—the “Pay Now” button vanished after login. We traced the issue to a routed modal state that only broke after multiple page transitions. Manual QA […]
Bullet‑proofing React UI: Testing with Jest 30 & React Testing Library 16
Failing Pixels at 3 a.m. in Bogotá Picture this: I’m half‑awake in a Bogotá Airbnb, Slack‑calling Marisa in Manila. Her newly merged React banner looks pristine in local dev—but in production the CTA button refuses to fire. We had skipped unit tests “just this once.” Three hours (and two cold empanadas) later we discovered an unbound […]
Type‑Safe React with TypeScript: Tips & Patterns
Surf‑Side Pair Review in Santa Teresa Sunrise painted the Pacific pink while Andrés and I huddled over a hotspot at a Costa Rican surf hostel. His pull request introduced a new React modal, but the props object was typed as any. One mis‑spelled field crashed staging—minutes before a demo in Bogotá. We refactored on the spot: […]
Build Your Own React CLI with oclif: From Zero to npx Install
Timezone Tetris in Panama City Last month I was pair‑programming with Carla, a junior dev clocked in from Málaga, when our React codebase needed yet another boilerplate component. Typing the same props scaffold for the third time, I joked, “We could write a CLI to spit this out faster than our internet can lag.” Forty‑five […]