“You’re doing it wrong!”

Yesterday, I announced the launch of my brand-new React course, The Joy of React. I want to share an exclusive video with you, taken from inside the course. It's about “best practices”.

If you spend as much time as I do in online developer communities, you've likely seen this sort of exchange quite a bit:

This is especially common with modern hooks-based React. There are just so many ways to use hooks, and so few of them are aligned with the best practices. 😅

This sort of feedback is intended to be helpful, and the advice is usually sound! But it can feel really overwhelming. It can trigger impostor syndrome, embarrassment, shame.

I recorded a short (≈4 minute) video that digs deep into this stuff. I really hope you'll check it out. I think this is the sort of pep talk that we all need right now:

Watch “You’re doing it wrong!”

In my course, you'll learn how to write idiomatic React code that is well-aligned with modern best practices.

But I also wanted to make sure my course would help you understand why the established best practices are worthwhile. So much of the advice online is “Do this, not that”, without ever explaining the underlying rationale!

The truth is, there will be times where we need to write code that bends or breaks the best practices. The real world is messy like that!

And if we don't know why the rule exists, of course it'll be stressful when we break it! We don't know what the consequences are! Will this cause huge problems down the line, or will it be fine? We don't know!

My #1 goal with The Joy of React is to help you build an intuition for React. When you understand how things work at a deeper level, it becomes obvious why certain patterns are good or bad. You don't have to memorize any arbitrary rules, and you'll know immediately whether it's OK (or not) to bend the rules in any given situation.

Now, I don't want to over-promise — building a deep intuition takes time and practice. But the reason I spent the last two years building this course is because I believe I can help you get pretty far down that path. And my gosh, building with React is so much more fun when you have that intuition! ❤️

As I mentioned yesterday, The Joy of React is currently on sale, but that sale ends soon. You can sign up here:

Register now

But yeah, hope you found this video useful! I'll be sending some more little goodies soon as well. 😄

Thanks! 💖
—Josh