First Paint, Then Hydrate: Getting Started with Server-Side Rendering in Next.js & React 18
Hook — 04 : 45 a.m., Chiang Mai ↔ Chicago pairing sessionMy fan rattled as I watched Liam share his screen from a snowy Chicago apartment. He’d deployed our new marketing site—but Lighthouse showed a blank screen for nearly four seconds on 3G. “Dude, it’s client-side only,” I said, waving at the flame-chart gaps. We […]
Ship Faster, Load Smarter: Code-Splitting & Lazy Loading in React 18
Hook — 05:41 a.m., Bogotá ↔ Berlin stand-upThe video feed stuttered as Anika demoed our new React 18-powered reporting portal. On her German fiber it felt snappy; on my Colombian Airbnb Wi-Fi it crawled—15 MB of JavaScript before the first chart even blinked. “We need to diet this bundle,” I joked. Anika raised an eyebrow, […]
Speed Without the Sweat — Mastering React 18 Performance with React.memo, useMemo, and useCallback
Hook — 05:17 a.m., Medellín ⇆ Melbourne code-reviewSilvio’s laptop fan screamed through Google Meet. “Any click lags half a second,” he groaned while demoing our React 18 analytics portal. I opened React DevTools on the shared session: dozens of child charts re-rendering when a parent prop ticked. “Let’s memoize the noise,” I said. Twenty minutes, […]
Designing for Everyone: Building Accessible React 18 Apps with ARIA Roles & Semantic HTML
Hook — 06:12 a.m., Split-screen between Buenos Aires & BerlinMaria’s screen share was a blur of VoiceOver output: “Button … Button … Button.” Labels missing, headings out of order—our brand-new React 18 dashboard was useless to her blind QA tester in Berlin. We’d spent weeks perfecting charts, ignored basic accessibility, and now the sprint demo […]
Rendering in the Matrix: A Deep Dive into React’s Virtual DOM in React 18
Hook — 04:57 a.m., Prague ↔ Manila debugging sessionPaolo’s cursor blinked on VS Code Live Share while the rest of his city slept. “James, why does toggling this sidebar repaint the whole page?” I was six time zones away, sipping lukewarm mate in a hostel kitchen. We opened Chrome DevTools, hit Performance, and watched layer […]
Managing Global State in React 18: Context API vs. Redux—A Remote Engineer’s Field Guide
Hook — 07:18 a.m., Cancún ↔ Cape Town pair-programming“My shopping-cart badge resets every time I switch tabs!” Lena’s voice crackled through the call. It was midnight for her in South Africa, dawn for me on the Yucatán coast. We scrolled through her repo: prop-drilling six levels deep, duplicate fetches, and an ad-hoc event bus. Five […]
Beyond useState: Crafting Custom React 18 Hooks that Scale
Hook – 5:03 AM, Lisbon ↔ Tokyo code reviewCoffee barely brewed when my Slack lit up: “James, why does every component in the dashboard re-fetch on scroll?” Kenji in Tokyo had copy-pasted the same useEffect block into eight files—and they were fighting for bandwidth like seagulls over fries. We screen-shared; within twenty minutes we replaced […]
React 18 Hooks Under the Hood: useState, useEffect, and the Mind-Shift Beyond
Hook — 06:42 AM, Medellín ↔ Melbourne stand-upMy Zoom tiles looked like a quilt: Antonia in Australia fighting jet-lag, Diego sipping Dominican espresso, me dodging parrots outside a coworking patio. Diego’s first ticket of the sprint? Refactor a scrappy class component into hooks. Ten minutes in, his screen froze—setState race condition. I said, “Let’s reboot […]
From JSX to Browser with React 18: Your First Component, Demystified
My day started with mango oatmeal, a gecko on the wall, and a Slack ping from Valentina—our newest junior dev in Bogotá.“Why won’t my button render? I copied the tutorial exactly!”I glanced at her repo while the sun crawled over the Indian Ocean. One missing import and an outdated ReactDOM.render was holding her back. Twenty […]
Upgrading to React 18 from a Beach-Side Café
The sun wasn’t supposed to get this hot at 9 a.m., but here I was—laptop balanced on a wobbly café table, toes buried in Nicaraguan sand—trying to explain React 18’s new createRoot API to a mentee in Warsaw. He shared his screen; I shared mine. Zoom lagged. A rogue sea breeze slammed my CSS hot-reload […]