Rendering & Frameworks articles, tutorials, and guides

In-depth articles, tutorials, and guides on Rendering & Frameworks — covering everything from fundamentals to advanced patterns.

The Stale Closure Problem in React Hooks

Rendering & Frameworks

Stale closures are one of the most common and confusing sources of bugs in React hooks. They occur when a function captures a variable at the time it was created and does not see later updates — resulting in logic that operates on outdated state or props.

Memoization Pitfalls in React: When useMemo and useCallback Make Things Worse

Rendering & Frameworks

Memoization in React is a performance optimization, not a default behavior. But many codebases use useMemo and useCallback everywhere — creating overhead, obscuring intent, and sometimes preventing the optimizations they were meant to enable. Knowing when memoization helps and when it hurts is more important than knowing the API.

Suspense Boundaries: Declarative Loading States in React

Rendering & Frameworks

React Suspense changes how loading states work. Instead of managing isLoading flags in every component, you declare where loading UI should appear with Suspense boundaries, and React takes care of showing fallbacks when any child is not ready to render.

React Server Components: What They Are and What They Actually Change

Rendering & Frameworks

React Server Components are the most significant change to the React component model since hooks. They run exclusively on the server, have zero bundle size contribution, and enable direct access to server resources — but they come with a new mental model that takes time to internalize.

Streaming SSR: How Servers Send HTML Before the Page Is Ready

Rendering & Frameworks

Traditional server-side rendering waits for all data to be fetched before sending any HTML. Streaming SSR changes this by sending HTML in chunks as it becomes ready, dramatically improving time to first byte and perceived performance for data-heavy pages.

Hydration in React: What It Is and Why It Sometimes Goes Wrong

Rendering & Frameworks

Hydration is the process of attaching React's event listeners and state to server-rendered HTML. It's what makes SSR-rendered pages interactive — and when it fails, you get one of the most confusing categories of React error.

Concurrent Rendering in React: How It Works and Why It Matters

Rendering & Frameworks

React's concurrent rendering allows multiple render tasks to be in-flight simultaneously, prioritised by urgency. It's the feature that makes your app feel responsive even while doing expensive work — and it changes how you should think about React's rendering model.

React's Fiber Architecture: How React Became Interruptible

Rendering & Frameworks

React rewrote its core rendering engine in 2017 to introduce Fiber — an architecture that enables prioritised, interruptible, and resumable rendering. Here's what changed and why it matters for modern React features.

Virtual DOM Diffing Complexity Explained

Rendering & Frameworks

The virtual DOM is one of the most discussed ideas in frontend development, yet the actual algorithm behind it — and why it makes tradeoffs it does — is rarely explained clearly. Here is what actually happens when React diffs two trees.

React's Reconciliation Algorithm Explained

Rendering & Frameworks

Every time state or props change, React has to figure out what actually changed in the UI and update only those parts. The process behind this decision is called reconciliation — and understanding it will change how you write components.