Reacting Slowly: The Modern Era

Eventually, jQuery wasn't enough. Projects grew larger, and updating the DOM manually became a nightmare of spaghetti state.

Then came React.

Instead of describing how to transition the UI, I could describe what the UI should look like for a given state. It felt like pure magic.

But with React came a massive build pipeline, package-lock files, and complex state managers. In this episode, I reflect on the transition to the modern web stack, and why the simplest tools are still sometimes the best.