Exploring React My Own Way

Hi, I'm Zachary. Our keynote speaker this morning is Oliver and his team. So over the last year, we're really excited to be here and I'm really excited to be able to talk to Oliver. So we're excited to be able to talk to Oliver, and we're obviously excited to be able to talk to Oliver. That's why we're so excited to be here.

We're going to talk about React, and I'm going to be talking about TypeScript and when I say that, I mean, there's a lot of nice things to talk about and I'm going to talk about React, but I'm going to talk about its benefits. I'm going to talk about it from a JavaScript perspective.

Hi guys. So thank you for having me in React Summit 2020 Remote Edition. I'm super excited to be here and today, I'll be talking about my journey of learning React. How do I go, you know, about things in learning React? How do I learn things at present as well whenever I'm stuck? So I'll be discussing about that. So my name is Tathagat Thapliyal and I work at Coding Blocks as a Product Engineer and Instructor for ReactJS and NodeJS. So we at Coding Blocks are basically bridging the gap between the industries and the professionals or you can say college students. We teach them, you know, basic computer science stuff like Android, web development, machine learning, data science. We prepare students for cracking big wakes like Google, Amazon, Microsoft. And we are, you know, basically, doing this. So I work, I develop products and, you know, teach students for React and Node over there. Right?

This is about myself and so I'll be starting with my journey in React. How did I get into this field? How did I actually get in the field of full stack, basically? So, as you all know, React is a fine-duty library, which is very popular these days, definitely, right? So, my journey, so basically, I'm a student, undergrad student. At present, I'm pursuing my Bachelor's of Computer Engineering. I'm not yet a graduate, I'm graduating this year. So, I'm a student and, one and a half year back, I was, you know, actually zero in full stack domain. I did not actually knew anything about what is full stack, what is web development, what is development, to be precise. So, I started my journey, I, you know, began with the very basic stuff, like HTML, CSS, which like every developer do. So, I started with those things, then ultimately, I chose React, you know, I chose to learn this, iDubi library. The reasons were for definitely popularity, many applications using React Js, by, you know, I was, you know, able to, you know, learn React and I was able to start it. That was the initial point, which I did not know anything about, you know, React JS. So, I went through, you know, multiple phases, so I'll be discussing them over here and I think that'll help you all, you know, actually learn any text pack. So, why and how to learn React is a very important question that should come in your mind whenever you start anything. Why and how to learn X, X is any text pack? So, why should you learn any text pack is a very important question that should every time, you know, have a use case in your mind, you should have a use case of any text pack you are learning.

You should know why you are learning that particular text pack, not because it is popular, not because it has a very high paying job, the majority of the jobs are, you know, that particular text pack. That is not the right way to learn any text pack.

So React has, you know, basically not that steep learning curve, but yeah, there is a bit learning curve involved in React. So you need to actually follow a step by step process and that is true for any text pack. So follow a step by step process.

The most important thing a developer should have is patience. Have patience. So that is the one most important thing which I like about developers. They have patience and they should have patience if they want to learn anything and they want to be a good developer. So follow things step by step. There's no shortcut to learn anything. There is no easy or there is easy easy ways, but there is no shortcuts to learning things. So you should follow a step by step approach. And you have to follow it. So once you follow the step by step approach, you will definitely learn that particular thing.

And most important thing which we and I also did was don't please never mess up any other tech stack along with the thing which you're learning. For example, React in this case don't mess any upcoming stack or very popular tech stack with React. Because there'll be time when you're not sure whether you are writing confusing code or you have a dumb team. So be sure about your code, don't mess up things, don't mess up react and maybe make TypeScript. Don't mix them because TypeScript is again transpiled back to JavaScript, so because browsers ultimately understand JavaScript, right. They don't understand TypeScript. So JavaScript is typed into TypeScript, and TypeScript is again, you know, transpiled back into JavaScript. So learning react with JavaScript should be followed, not with TypeScript, because you know, again, majority of the projects are using react and JavaScript, not React and TypeScript, right. Secondly, react-react.

So that is a very popular term, which developers, people have heard whenever they start with react. They you know, think react and Redux are related and Redux can only be used with react, that is not the case. React is an independent state management JavaScript library. You can use it with anything. But yeah, they are coupled together because they have a good use case. So people start with Redux.

So you should not, you know, hop into Redux, you should use the built-in state management of react. That is used most of the times, and Redux is definitely used whenever you have a large scale application. But for initial learning curve, you should not, you know, take Redux to learn state management in react.

Then talking about react with Gatsby, so Gatsby is again a static size generator, which is basically a very good thing to know. But actually, it has its own, you know, plugin system and it has its own learnings, like the GraphQL things and all. So Gatsby on its own, independent is a very good thing, but it is not a good thing to learn react, definitely.

So these are some key points which I, you know, I follow, and I have been following them. So the first day, which I decided to learn React. The first thing which I did was read the docs, I followed the docs from very basics, and I built the Hello World application, whatever they, you know, tell me to build, I do that particular thing. So I learn with docs while doing. So that is most important thing, learn with docs and, you know, learn to do things practically and learn to do them, you know, every day. So what I do is I keep a track on, you know, waka time. It's a very good tool. Most of you maybe know about it. So waka time is a very good tool to, you know, keep your activity tracker, activity track of daily coding, right? So I keep a track over there. I stick to my plans. And then the most important thing is learn react in public. And what is public meant? Public means the Internet of things available on the internet. So, for example, like this guy Chris, you know, tweeted about learning React in 10 tweets. So he has a thread of, you know, 10 tweets in which he teaches something or the other about React. And it is a very good, you know, thing to actually read. I read all the tweets and all of those 10 tweets, and they were a very good source of learning for me. So follow these people on maybe Twitter and Medium or somewhere else, and just see what are they actually sharing and what new things you can gain from them. And trust me, it is a very good source to learn. Secondly, so these were the, you know, some things which I use and have used in the past to learn new things. And whenever I want to learn something in existing stack or I want to explore a new tech stack. So I follow those things. So I started with Xero, and at present, I work with some of these technologies. So, like, I've been working with Node.js in the back end, basically ExpressJS, Happy. And in front-end, I've been working with React, EmberJS, VueJS, server-side, Nuxt, Next.

And GraphQL spec, Redux. So these are just some things which I work with which we at codingblocks are using to build our product and scale them. So, and so yeah, that is all from my side. Very short talk but yeah, I hope you got something out of it.

And I'm every time, any time, up for a discussion on anything related to like, operating systems, full stack development, like front end, back end. So I'm every time ready. I always, you know, I just, you know, feel energetic and I'm always seeking for people who want to discuss something about maybe full stack domain or stuff like that, right?

So yeah, you can catch me on Twitter, you can ping me, or you can find my most of the public projects on GitHub, my GitHub handle is there, given. And I write blogs as well. So not much these days, but yeah, I do write blogs and share my experience over Medium. So you can go and follow me over there as well. So that is all, guys, from my side. And once again, thank you for having me in the React Summit 2020. So yeah, any questions, I'll be most more than happy to, you know, answer them after the talk and I'll be available anytime, right? So yeah, thanks a lot. Cheers.