#React
12 articles — newest first.
- 8 min read
How I stop re-renders in big React forms: uncontrolled refs
Production tactics for large React forms: use uncontrolled inputs, refs, and event delegation to kill keystroke re-renders while keeping validation sane.
- 8 min read
Profiling a React app from request to paint
A slow interaction has four possible homes: the network, the server, hydration, or your render. Reading the Performance panel and the React Profiler together tells you which one, before you optimise the wrong thing.
- 8 min read
Shrinking a React bundle: what actually moved the number
Bundle analysis past the treemap: which dependencies are worth replacing, why a barrel file quietly defeats tree-shaking, and the difference between smaller and faster.
- 9 min read
How I orchestrate React with a typed event bus
A production pattern I use to coordinate React components without prop drilling or store-bloat: a strictly typed event bus with React-safe hooks.
- 7 min read
Web Workers, and the React jank they actually fix
Moving work off the main thread only helps if the main thread was the problem. How to tell, what the structured-clone tax costs you, and the transfer that makes workers worth it.
- 10 min read
Optimistic React UIs that don't drift from the server
How I ship optimistic UI in React without state drift: versioned writes, idempotency keys, React Query/Zustand patterns, and the rollback math.
- 8 min read
A WebSocket reconnect state machine for React and Node
Reconnection logic written as ad-hoc flags always breaks. An explicit state machine with backoff, jitter and heartbeats survives flaky networks and server restarts.
- 8 min read
When useMemo actually helps in React 19, and how to measure it
A blunt, practical guide to useMemo in React 19: where it genuinely helps, where it’s noise, and how to profile renders before you cargo‑cult memoization.
- 8 min read
Halving WebSocket payloads with MessagePack in Node and React
Where JSON over WebSockets actually costs you, what MessagePack does and does not fix, and how to batch high-frequency events so the wire is not the bottleneck.
- 7 min read
60fps live meters in React without re-rendering the tree
Streaming telemetry into a React UI at 60fps: why setState per frame is the wrong tool, and how a ring buffer plus a direct canvas write keeps the component tree still.
- 10 min read
Stop mixing render and domain state in React dashboards
A pragmatic split for large React 18 dashboards: keep server/domain data out of UI stores, cut re-renders and payloads with a thin serialization adapter.
- 8 min read
Real-Time Telemetry: Why Polling Lies, and WebSockets Don't
Polling dashboards lie between ticks — I learned that the hard way. Now I push telemetry over WebSockets for sub-second parity across every React client.