Keeping It Simple

Rate this content
Bookmark

Netlify CEO and co-founder Matt Biilmann reflects on the history of React, the promises of the Jamstack, and the complexity that can creep into developer workflows if we don't continue to defend simplicity over time. In this lightning talk, Matt describes the trade-offs developers face to deliver large sites and introduces a new idea for a more scalable future solution.

9 min
14 May, 2021

Video Summary and Transcription

React brought simplicity to building browser-based applications, but as new concepts like context, hooks, server components, and streaming are introduced, it's important to know the current state of the application. The JAMstack simplifies reasoning about the state of web properties through immutable assets and atomic deploys. However, as the JAMstack evolves, challenges arise in areas such as build times and API caching for large projects, especially e-commerce.

1. Introduction to React and Simplicity

Short description:

Today, I'm going to talk about simplicity and state and the dangers of steering our communities towards complexity. React launched as a view layer that brought simplicity to the process of building browser-based applications. It made it so much easier to reason about what experiences our users were having based on any given state. As we want React to solve harder problems, we're introducing new concepts like context, hooks, server components, and streaming. But it's important to keep ourselves honest and know the current state of our application and what a user will experience.

Hi, everybody. I'm Matt Bihlmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify. Today, I'm going to talk about simplicity and state and the dangers of steering our communities towards complexity.

So, back in 2013, React launched as a view layer that brought simplicity to the process of building browser-based applications. Anyone that's tried to build a browser-based application before React had to deal with this mix of state all over the DOM. You would have bindings listening to DOM elements. You would have DOM elements that contained states. You would have AJAX listeners that would fetch, request, and update DOM elements, and as you build out more complex applications, reasoning about what state your DOM was in and what state your application went in and what a user would experience became increasingly hard. React launched this idea of turning the whole UI into a function of your state, and it really made it so much easier to reason about what experiences our users were having based on any given state. You could take a state, feed it to a tree of DOM of React components, and you would know for any given state what the user would see. React fundamentally made it easy to reason a bit about the state of your application, and that was one of the superpowers that made React powerful and adopted.

Of course, as we want React to solve harder and harder problems for us and solve more of the problems of building applications, we're introducing a lot of new concepts like context or hooks or the new proposed server components or streaming. And as we go along this way, of course it's important to be curious and excited and explore where we can go, but it's also important that we try to keep, keeping ourselves honest, do we still know what is the current state of our application? And do we know at any given time what will a user experience for a given state? This was like the initial superpower that gave React a feeling of simplicity and that made applications easy to reason about. So as we evolve React as a more complete framework, how do we keep that quality?

2. Reasoning about State and Challenges in JAMstack

Short description:

Web development has made it harder to reason about the state of your web property. The GAM stack simplifies reasoning about the state of your web property by deploying immutable assets to an edge network. Atomic deploys ensure that you always know the state of your deployment. As the JAMstack architecture evolves, more complex concepts are introduced, such as rehydration, dynamic SSR, and incremental static regeneration. It is important to know what is currently deployed, what a user will experience, and the impact of rollbacks or deploy previews. Large JAMstack projects, especially e-commerce, face challenges in build times and API caching.

And the idea back then was very similar. I had seen how over time, web development had made it harder and harder to reason about the state of your web property. We had started out from a world where a browser would fetch files from a server to a world where we would run a program to a world where that program would always talk to a database for every request and to a world where to scale that architecture, we started introducing different layers of caching between servers and databases as the web grew global and we needed to reach users all over the world.

We introduced CDNs for assets or images or JavaScript files and to understand our system as developers, we had to be able to reason about all of these different layers of the stack. The GAM stack was really an architectural approach to say, how can we make it easy to reason about the state of your web property? How can we go towards an architectural approach to building for the web? When instead of this complex request response cycle flowing through all these different layers of caching, we take code and we take your content, your APIs or your data, we run a build and we deploy immutable assets to an edge network.

And as we do that, we start introducing this idea of atomic deploys where you always know you have a state, you've deployed, it's live. You know exactly what documents and HTML pages has been built as part of that. And when you change to a new deploy, it's an atomic operation where everything goes live at the same time and where you always know if a user visits a URL, what are they going to see? Now, in a similar way as with React, as we want the GAMSTAG architecture to solve more and more complex problems for us and build more and more applications in the gray zone of all that kinds of different use cases, we also starting to see more and more complex concepts introduced into the stack, rehydration, dynamic SSR for some pages, tiered CDN caching, approaches like incremental static regeneration and stale while revalidates HTTP headers. And in the same way as with React, as we built this future, we have to really ask ourselves, do you know what is currently deployed at any stage? And do you know what a user will experience if they visit a given URL? Do you know exactly what happens if you roll back to an earlier deploy? And do you know what happens if you push a deploy preview number 110 to the main branch right now? Now, of course, one of the reasons that we are exploring a lot of these new concepts like incremental static regeneration and stale while virality is because we're trying to build increasingly large projects with a JAMstack approach, especially large e-commerce projects with hundreds of thousands or even million of catalog pages have proven challenging.

Check out more articles and videos

We constantly think of articles and videos that might spark Git people interest / skill us up or help building a stellar career

React Advanced Conference 2022React Advanced Conference 2022
25 min
A Guide to React Rendering Behavior
Top Content
React is a library for "rendering" UI from components, but many users find themselves confused about how React rendering actually works. What do terms like "rendering", "reconciliation", "Fibers", and "committing" actually mean? When do renders happen? How does Context affect rendering, and how do libraries like Redux cause updates? In this talk, we'll clear up the confusion and provide a solid foundation for understanding when, why, and how React renders. We'll look at: - What "rendering" actually is - How React queues renders and the standard rendering behavior - How keys and component types are used in rendering - Techniques for optimizing render performance - How context usage affects rendering behavior| - How external libraries tie into React rendering
React Summit Remote Edition 2021React Summit Remote Edition 2021
33 min
Building Better Websites with Remix
Top Content
Remix is a new web framework from the creators of React Router that helps you build better, faster websites through a solid understanding of web fundamentals. Remix takes care of the heavy lifting like server rendering, code splitting, prefetching, and navigation and leaves you with the fun part: building something awesome!
React Advanced Conference 2022React Advanced Conference 2022
30 min
Using useEffect Effectively
Top Content
Can useEffect affect your codebase negatively? From fetching data to fighting with imperative APIs, side effects are one of the biggest sources of frustration in web app development. And let’s be honest, putting everything in useEffect hooks doesn’t help much. In this talk, we'll demystify the useEffect hook and get a better understanding of when (and when not) to use it, as well as discover how declarative effects can make effect management more maintainable in even the most complex React apps.
React Advanced Conference 2023React Advanced Conference 2023
33 min
React Compiler - Understanding Idiomatic React (React Forget)
React provides a contract to developers- uphold certain rules, and React can efficiently and correctly update the UI. In this talk we'll explore these rules in depth, understanding the reasoning behind them and how they unlock new directions such as automatic memoization. 
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
20 min
Routing in React 18 and Beyond
Top Content
Concurrent React and Server Components are changing the way we think about routing, rendering, and fetching in web applications. Next.js recently shared part of its vision to help developers adopt these new React features and take advantage of the benefits they unlock.In this talk, we’ll explore the past, present and future of routing in front-end applications and discuss how new features in React and Next.js can help us architect more performant and feature-rich applications.
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
27 min
(Easier) Interactive Data Visualization in React
Top Content
If you’re building a dashboard, analytics platform, or any web app where you need to give your users insight into their data, you need beautiful, custom, interactive data visualizations in your React app. But building visualizations hand with a low-level library like D3 can be a huge headache, involving lots of wheel-reinventing. In this talk, we’ll see how data viz development can get so much easier thanks to tools like Plot, a high-level dataviz library for quick & easy charting, and Observable, a reactive dataviz prototyping environment, both from the creator of D3. Through live coding examples we’ll explore how React refs let us delegate DOM manipulation for our data visualizations, and how Observable’s embedding functionality lets us easily repurpose community-built visualizations for our own data & use cases. By the end of this talk we’ll know how to get a beautiful, customized, interactive data visualization into our apps with a fraction of the time & effort!

Workshops on related topic

React Summit 2023React Summit 2023
170 min
React Performance Debugging Masterclass
Featured WorkshopFree
Ivan’s first attempts at performance debugging were chaotic. He would see a slow interaction, try a random optimization, see that it didn't help, and keep trying other optimizations until he found the right one (or gave up).
Back then, Ivan didn’t know how to use performance devtools well. He would do a recording in Chrome DevTools or React Profiler, poke around it, try clicking random things, and then close it in frustration a few minutes later. Now, Ivan knows exactly where and what to look for. And in this workshop, Ivan will teach you that too.
Here’s how this is going to work. We’ll take a slow app → debug it (using tools like Chrome DevTools, React Profiler, and why-did-you-render) → pinpoint the bottleneck → and then repeat, several times more. We won’t talk about the solutions (in 90% of the cases, it’s just the ol’ regular useMemo() or memo()). But we’ll talk about everything that comes before – and learn how to analyze any React performance problem, step by step.
(Note: This workshop is best suited for engineers who are already familiar with how useMemo() and memo() work – but want to get better at using the performance tools around React. Also, we’ll be covering interaction performance, not load speed, so you won’t hear a word about Lighthouse 🤐)
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
132 min
Concurrent Rendering Adventures in React 18
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
With the release of React 18 we finally get the long awaited concurrent rendering. But how is that going to affect your application? What are the benefits of concurrent rendering in React? What do you need to do to switch to concurrent rendering when you upgrade to React 18? And what if you don’t want or can’t use concurrent rendering yet?

There are some behavior changes you need to be aware of! In this workshop we will cover all of those subjects and more.

Join me with your laptop in this interactive workshop. You will see how easy it is to switch to concurrent rendering in your React application. You will learn all about concurrent rendering, SuspenseList, the startTransition API and more.
React Summit Remote Edition 2021React Summit Remote Edition 2021
177 min
React Hooks Tips Only the Pros Know
Top Content
Featured Workshop
The addition of the hooks API to React was quite a major change. Before hooks most components had to be class based. Now, with hooks, these are often much simpler functional components. Hooks can be really simple to use. Almost deceptively simple. Because there are still plenty of ways you can mess up with hooks. And it often turns out there are many ways where you can improve your components a better understanding of how each React hook can be used.You will learn all about the pros and cons of the various hooks. You will learn when to use useState() versus useReducer(). We will look at using useContext() efficiently. You will see when to use useLayoutEffect() and when useEffect() is better.
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
174 min
React, TypeScript, and TDD
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
ReactJS is wildly popular and thus wildly supported. TypeScript is increasingly popular, and thus increasingly supported.

The two together? Not as much. Given that they both change quickly, it's hard to find accurate learning materials.

React+TypeScript, with JetBrains IDEs? That three-part combination is the topic of this series. We'll show a little about a lot. Meaning, the key steps to getting productive, in the IDE, for React projects using TypeScript. Along the way we'll show test-driven development and emphasize tips-and-tricks in the IDE.
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
145 min
Web3 Workshop - Building Your First Dapp
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
In this workshop, you'll learn how to build your first full stack dapp on the Ethereum blockchain, reading and writing data to the network, and connecting a front end application to the contract you've deployed. By the end of the workshop, you'll understand how to set up a full stack development environment, run a local node, and interact with any smart contract using React, HardHat, and Ethers.js.
React Summit 2023React Summit 2023
151 min
Designing Effective Tests With React Testing Library
Featured Workshop
React Testing Library is a great framework for React component tests because there are a lot of questions it answers for you, so you don’t need to worry about those questions. But that doesn’t mean testing is easy. There are still a lot of questions you have to figure out for yourself: How many component tests should you write vs end-to-end tests or lower-level unit tests? How can you test a certain line of code that is tricky to test? And what in the world are you supposed to do about that persistent act() warning?
In this three-hour workshop we’ll introduce React Testing Library along with a mental model for how to think about designing your component tests. This mental model will help you see how to test each bit of logic, whether or not to mock dependencies, and will help improve the design of your components. You’ll walk away with the tools, techniques, and principles you need to implement low-cost, high-value component tests.
Table of contents- The different kinds of React application tests, and where component tests fit in- A mental model for thinking about the inputs and outputs of the components you test- Options for selecting DOM elements to verify and interact with them- The value of mocks and why they shouldn’t be avoided- The challenges with asynchrony in RTL tests and how to handle them
Prerequisites- Familiarity with building applications with React- Basic experience writing automated tests with Jest or another unit testing framework- You do not need any experience with React Testing Library- Machine setup: Node LTS, Yarn