Top Things to Know Before Hiring the Right React Developer

The usage of JavaScript has seen a massive growth over the last few years. Currently, there are 1.79 billion websites in the world wide web, in which 96.7% of them use JavaScript. Since JavaScript is a client-side scripting language, the code will be processed on the user’s browser instead of a web server, and this cuts down the consumption of high bandwidth and slow page loading. Nevertheless, like the server-side scripting language like PHP, Ruby and Python, the JavaScript code can be inserted in an HTML page.

Due to its ability to create dynamic and interactive web pages, JS is used to animate elements on a web page, to create games (also in-browser games), build web servers and develop infrastructure (back-end) using Node.js. JavaScript is one of the most sought out skill sets by companies around the world. According to Stack Overflow, JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language for eight years in a row.

Look at the below Google Trends report wherein you can see the consistent usage of JavaScript throughout the year.

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In this row, we have React from the same JS family that seems to be the most expected in-demand skill soon after JavaScript in recent years and near future. Apparently the popularity and wide-usage of React, in turn, sets the bar high for the competent React developers in the market. Now, the question arises, how do you find a right React developer and what are the things that stand evident that he/she is the right React developer your company is looking for? Don’t worry - we are here to cut-down the humongous burden off your shoulder. The following are the things you should be aware of before hiring the right React developer.

What is React, and why is it popular?

React is an open-source JavaScript library for building fast and interactive user interfaces for the web as well as mobile applications. In the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture, React is the “View” which works on how the application feels and looks.

• It is easy to write components in React, and the reusability of those components is a definite advantage, especially for the large enterprises.
• Since the components remain discrete,  i.e. has its own property and function, several developers can simultaneously work on different UI components.
• When data changes, it efficiently renders and updates the right components.
• The components help you to debug the code easily, and it involves unidirectional data flow.
• It comes with various performance enhancements and extensions which allow you to create full-fledged front-end applications.
• Seamless integration into any of the applications, be it a portion or entire application.
• Created and maintained by Facebook, it has huge community support, and 100k starts on Github.

What makes a skilful React developer?

One cannot be a React developer without mastering a front-end development first; therefore, the required skills and technologies needed for the front-end development also apply to the prerequisites of a React developer. To get detailed information about the below-listed requirements for a front-end developer, visit Top 10 things to know before hiring a front-end developer or looking for a skilful front-end developer who best fits your company requirements? Reach out to us to find you the right team player.

Prerequisites:

i) Front-end development

1. HTML, CSS, JS
2. JS libraries like jQuery and React
3. Front-end and JS frameworks like Bootstrap, Bulma and Foundation
4. CSS preprocessors like SASS, LESS
5. Asynchronous JS and XML (AJAX)
6. REST APIs
7. Build tools like Gulp, Grunt and modular bundle like Webpack
8. Naming conventions like BEM for HTML and CSS
9. JS standardization like ECMAScript (ES6/7/8)

ii) Concepts and Methods

The significance of adequate experience in JavaScript cannot be stressed enough as the name itself goes by “ReactJS”. Especially, one must be familiar with the following things in JS and its standardization to understand and structure the application logic and flow.

Programming Concepts: functions, objects, arrays, classes.

JS: ‘this’ keyword, filter, map, and reduce methods.

ES6/7/8: let & const, arrow functions, template literals, default parameters, object literals, rest and spread operators and destructing assignment.

iii) In React

1. About React and its core principles
2. JS architecture (design Pattern) like Flux, and other related libraries like Redux and Mobx
3. Basic understanding of DOM (Document Object Model)
4. Node.js - a runt-time environment
5. Package Managers like NPM and Yarn
6. Mobile app framework like React Native
7. To perform Unit Testing with Karma, Jest, TDD, Mocha, VCS, Selenium and Enzyme.
8. To work on third-party dependencies and debug dependency conflicts.

JavaScript Syntax Extension (JSX): Similar to a template language, it is a syntax extension to JavaScript, and it comes with full capabilities of JavaScript to define what the UI should like when used with React. Being a combination of HTML and JavaScript, it allows you to write HTML structures in the same file that contains a JS script. Though React can be used without the need of JSX, the availability of the UI inside the JS code comes as a visual aid in JSX. It also displays the useful error and warning notifications.

Virtual DOM: A DOM used to define how documents are accessed and manipulated on a web page. It treats the entire structure of a web page, i.e. the XML or HTML code in the form of a tree wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document.

The Virtual DOM in React takes an exact copy (a lightweight representation) of the Real DOM in the memory. Whenever the state of an object changes in the web application, the Virtual DOM only updates that object in the Real DOM instead of updating all the objects and thereby, speeding up the data manipulation process.

Flux: An application architecture used to build web apps (by Facebook) and implements a unidirectional flow to understand the workflow (action,  dispatcher, store and view).

React Native: It is a framework for building flexible and dynamic mobile applications. The mobile apps can be built only using JavaScript and by not using any other programming languages. The React Native app is a real mobile app and not any web app running in mobiles.

Declarative paradigm: You need to declare/tell React what you want and using the React DOM library, it will build the actual UI and thus makes React a Declarative Paradigm in contrast to the step-by-step instruction as in the Imperative Paradigm.

Babel: A free and open-source JavaScript compiler, and popularly used to convert ES6+ (i.e. ES7 & 8) code into backwards compatible versions of JavaScript. This transcompiler comes handy when the JS newer versions are needed to run by the older JavaScript engines.

Storybook: A most popularly used open-source tool for developing UI components. It allows developers to create independent and interactive components in an isolated environment as it runs outside of the application, and there is no need to bother about app requirements and dependencies.  

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To learn more about React and its features, go to the official website https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html

Added Plus:

• An adequate experience in cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Linode, etc
• Open-source cloud management platforms like OpenStack and Apache CloudStack, and cloud hosting services like GitHub.
• About iOS and android app development
• Content Management System - WordPress
• Servers - Apache & Nginx
• Project management tools - Jira and Zoho Projects
• Office documentation tools - Microsoft Office & Google Suite.
  

Apart from the above-stated things, a highly-competent React developer must possess the ability to build a seamless and intuitive User Interfaces (UIs) for both Android and iOS applications. Most importantly, he/she must have mastery on moving the existing React web applications to React Native. As a team player, a right React developer needs a knack over detecting and resolving bugs without making any compromise on the quality and performance of the application. Are you specifically looking for a React developer to build a dynamic web as well as mobile applications? Or do you need to get further information about the other aspects in the roadmap of finding a right React developer? Connect with our team to get all your questions answered.