React Developer: What, Why, How (react dev tool)

In today’s modern world, wherein more and more things, opportunities, and concepts are being centralized, modernized, and migrated to the digital world, the need for Information technology (IT) professionals is exponentially growing. One of the most in demand IT jobs of the past decade is React developer. In fact, some of the biggest names in the internet are created from react.js such as Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and Dropbox.
With the increase of websites and web applications that use react.js technology, React developers are in the perfect spot to take advantage of this huge opportunity that will last for years. Increase in opportunities is synonymous to increase in competition as well. This article provides you guidance on what a React developer does to how to be a good React developer to excel in this specific niche of IT career.

WHAT THEY DO

React developers are specialized skilled information technology professionals that mainly use react.js to create and design JavaScript-based websites and web applications.

A kind of JavaScript library, react.js is free to use by anyone (even by non-developers) and it is open-source as well. It is maintained largely by Meta and the developer community. One of its biggest benefits and a favorite of many developers is the reusability of components that greatly saves a lot of time for developers.

React developers act as front-end developers. They are the ones who translate the business requirements into technical specifications that are suitable for the front-end. These technical specifications use the foundation of HTML and CSS concepts, which are prerequisite knowledge to become a React developer.

HOW TO BE GOOD AT IT

PRACTICE

I believe this one is a no-brainer. To be good at something, you need to learn the basics and foundation of it. That is true as well if you want to become a React developer. To be a React developer, you have to gain the prerequisite of working knowledge with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Essentially, that is the right order to learn those tech stacks.

No Pain, No Gain

You have to dedicate a few hours regularly to learn the concepts and apply them by making a portfolio of your own. There’s no shortcut in learning these basic things. You have to endure the long hours of reading, understanding, analyzing, drafting, designing, programming, testing, and troubleshooting starting from your first ‘Hello World’ single web-page to fully deployed web applications with thousands of monthly users.

Free Online Resources

Your best bet in starting your learning journey is via free online tutorials or online courses from any popular educational or video-sharing platform such as Coursera and YouTube. I suggest free because the paid ones are only worth it for more advanced level concepts and techniques of react.js. Use the best practices that you encounter along the way and be familiar with their limitations, pros, and cons.

Connect With Like-Minded People

Immerse yourself in the React developer community once you’ve mastered the fundamentals. They may be found on social networking sites such as Facebook, Reddit, and forums (i.e. Syncfusion, etc.). Participate in answering questions and sharing ideas to any topics related to react.js. In this way, you are able to not only help others having react.js development problems, but you will apply the knowledge that you gained and relearn things more than once.
Friendly tip: You don’t have to memorize every essential code. Preparing a template for your most commonly used code structure (list of relevant imports, code snippets of best practices, logic of functions you created, etc.) will give you a good head start in starting or continuing any web application projects. Plus, Google is your best friend, just in case you are unsure of implementing something.

DOCUMENTATION

This one might be out of newbies’ expectations. But to be a good React developer (and this applies to all kinds of developers as well), you have to treat the online React documentation as your first line of defense whenever you find yourself stuck in solving a problem related to react.js.
The documentation itself defines and explains concepts that developers definitely will utilize in their creations. Each concept has sample code implementation and discusses best practices and when you should apply them.
But of course, documentation is not the perfect reference out there. There are parts in the documentation that are vague for beginners (due to the usage of technical jargon) but a few Google searches will provide you results that explain those concepts in a way a developer will understand much better.

VISUAL CREATIVES

Being a React developer requires not only programming skills. Since they are working on the front-end, they are expected to be visually creative on the website or web application that they are developing. This creativity involves the application of proper and best practices of User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX).

From the overall look and feel (brand color, typography, shapes, media, etc.) to careful and innovative implementation of user experience (navigation, animation, logical order of information, etc.), all these make a React developer really marketable and ahead of others. React developers should capture the visual style of the requirements along with proper placement of content that users consume as they explore the website or web application.

WHY DO THEY LOVE NODE?

Many websites and web applications nowadays do not rely just on the usage of static pages. They are somewhat connected to a back-end infrastructure that gets data from front-end activity and pushes data depending on user activity requests. This specific task requires an effective and innovative solution in which node.js perfectly fits in.

React developers love Node because it efficiently handles requirements regarding high performance real-time web applications. Users get what they requested in less than half of a second. The non-blocking event-loop system that node.js offers makes the web application easy to scale and enables the server process requests effortlessly.

Developers frequently utilize react.js in conjunction with node.js environment to develop reusable UI components. React is an open-source JavaScript package that is frequently used as the View (V) in Model-View-Controller (MVC) since it employs a JavaScript virtual Document Object Model (DOM), which is quicker than a regular DOM.

Can we use React Native for web development?

React.js is really developed for web development. If the solution to the requirements best fits the usage of react.js, then by all means, use it together with its best practices. Web development does not mean you have to use react.js always. It’s just one of the numerous JavaScript-based libraries out there to be used by the developers, according to their needs and preference.

How to use React Developer Tools

One of the best practices being used by front-end developers is using the browser’s native inspect element tool to check if all functionality is expected to run with no hiccups and capture specific errors that the quality assurance tester reported.

React Developer Tools is somewhat like that, but offers more readability specifically built for React developers. It is a web-based extension that you can download for free and have access to React elements (similar to the elements tab in inspection tool, except that you actually see the React-named elements in the panel). It integrates with the web development tools and gives developers extra features that they can use on any website and web application created with react.js (for the purpose of developing, debugging, testing). Its features are Components and Profiler.

Once you download the web extension, you can immediately use it by right-clicking on your website or web application and clicking inspect. In the above screenshot, you can see the actual elements as segregated by different components (React tree).

Under components, there are various useful functions (particularly the four icons adjacent to the name of selected components) that React developers can use upon testing the web app. The developer tool has the capability to:

a. Suspend the selected component (useful when you are testing components or functionality that must be run in order).

b. Inspect the matching DOM element (which will basically bring you the regular elements tab, in HTML format).

c. Log component data to the console where you can see more data about the component.

d. View source for the selected element/component (useful whenever a React developer is debugging a web app and wants to see where the files are for those components, quicker way to do it).

React developers can also utilize the props section in which they input attributes or properties into the selected component and see the changes in the browser.

On the props section itself, you can copy the properties you’ve input (just click the copy icon) and paste and see the json format in the log console.

Using the search box, you may easily locate components you want to work on. Real-time highlighting of matched characters in order will occur.

You can activate the element inspection function, the icon right before the search bar. Once activated, you can select the component right within the developer tool and see in the browser the highlighted section which corresponds to that selected component.

Another cool thing with React Developer Tools is the hooks. It best works and only shows components that have interactive properties such as a clickable button. Whenever the button is clicked in the browser, the state of it changes (boolean, string, numeric, etc.) depending on the applied logic inside the JavaScript file.

Profiler enables developers to create performance profiles to analyze the performance of the React-based application. If the app has performance issues (you feel like the app is slow), developers use profiler to analyze the aspects that contribute to the issues and based on that, developers make specific modifications. It provides three specific visuals: flamegraph, ranked, interactions.

To use the profiler, click the record icon first. Afterwards, all actions that are going to be performed will be recorded.

As an example for the above flamegraph, it shows us that if the component lights up (green and yellow), it means the action performed was rendered. Otherwise, if it is grayed out, then rendering does not happen for the specific action.

More settings are available upon clicking the gear icon, such as changing the color theme, activating “Record why each component rendered while profiling”, and so on. Next to that gear icon is the number of steps recorded in which you can move in any steps to analyze specific performance.