React

After trying out MVC, Vanilla, and even Angular I found React to be my favorite Framework by a longshot. The community surrounds React is thriving, and I found myself liking the framework's structure and organization.

Redux

I've built several applications using redux and find that with Redux Toolkit I found it easier to add it from the very beginning than to add it when I absolutely need it. While the boiler plate Redux is useful in certain situations, I like leveraging the Redux Toolkit library to do in 1 file what would normally take 3, then expand from there when I need additional options.

Next.js

Next.js has been an amazing tool to implement Server-side Rendering for React. It picks up the slack that Create-React-App leaves, and opens up a lot of opportunities for faster page rendering and better SEO. It offers a simpler and more flexible architecture than Gatsby allowing larger sites and

Gatsby

As the chosen framework for this website, Gatsby.js provides a great pre-built SSR environment. While Next.js may be a more flexible, powerful, and often times simpler option, Gatsby provides a great opportunity to leverage existing templates and connections to quickly build a great looking JAM Stack application.

GraphQL/Apollo

It goes without saying that GraphQl is a powerful tool for React developers. Gatsby makes it easy by providing GraphQL out of the box. On other applications, I've found it creates an excellent environment of communication between back-end and front-end architectures. It may be overkill for simpler APIs, but the organization and beauty seem to make up for it.

Emotion.js - Styled Components

I've tried several styling libraries in React including Styled Components and found Emotion to be my favorite. While not particularly important which library is used, I found it very helpful to use Styled Components. It reminds me of the way Vue.js keeps its styling scoped to its components, and to me seems like a good response from the React community. Compared to Vanilla CSS and CSS Modules the organization of Styled Components is superb.

React Native

So far, I've only ever done tutorials in React Native, but, so far, it's been incredibly easy to use especially since I'm already familiar with the way React is structured. It's also a lot of fun to see how React Native's components work so effortlessly with mobile platforms.