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The effort has forced me to learn a lot about technologies I would have most likely otherwise skipped or picked up later. That's a benefit I didn't anticipate when I started doing this. A lot has happened just during the past year alone and it has been fun to be on the ride.

I Use Webpack and React

I rely heavily on webpack and React these days. In fact, the site is powered by them through Antwar, a little static site generator. I want to publish a solid public version of that somewhere in the near future, but the principles are simple and the source might be worth studying. Think it as the webpack of static site generators.

I used Redux with React on a recent project. It's one of those technologies worth understanding. There's not that much to learn. I see it more as a guideline rather than a library. But that's a good thing as you can shape your application on top of that. I am aware it's not the perfect fit for every project, but it's highly useful if you want an explicit data flow for your application.

Looking Forward

Looking forward MobX is very promising. It does certain things the opposite way than Redux (mutability is ok, references are fine) and it happens to fit Kanban well as evidenced by a demo implementation we did. There's a tradeoff to be made as it's not as explicit as Redux, but that can be a good thing depending on what you are doing.

Conclusion

I think we'll see more development on the scene as ideas from the existing solutions (Redux, MobX, Relay, all that) begin to converge. Perhaps we'll have something completely different in a year or two that makes the current solutions look antique. That happened a couple of times already so I don't see why it couldn't happen again.

It's both a good and frustrating time to be a front-end developer. It's good in sense that it has never been better. But the amount of innovation can be quite exhausting if you try to keep up all the time. I suppose they call it bleeding edge for a reason.