📨 #215: Dropdown, i18n, Next.js, Remix, Astro, shadcn, StyleX, Fancy Components, Expo, Static Hermes, Skia, ExecuTorch, Kotlin, Node, Shortest, Rolldown, Rspack, pnpm...

January 2, 2025 · 8 min read

Newsletter Editor - Docusaurus maintainer

Hi everyone!

We initially planned to return on 8th January.
But here I am a little earlier, wishing you all a Happy New Year! 🎉
With the end-of-year festivities, it's been a quiet week for React, as you'd expect.

I also take the opportunity to share a little newsletter retrospective, and thank you once again for reading the newsletter and making all this possible.

In 2024 the newsletter went from being a sustainable project to a break-even business. This allows me to invest more in the project and improve the content. Let's share some concrete figures from 2023 to 2024 :

📈 Subscribers: 31k ➡️ 46k - A great +15k subscribers increase this year. Not exponential as I expected, but still very nice!
👥 Writers: 1 ➡️ 4 - I'm no longer the sole writer of this curation newsletter: Benedikt, Matthieu and Cyril have backed me up when I was unavailable.
📨 Issues: 38 ➡️ 47 - Onboarding other writers allowed us to send out an email almost every week!
💰 Income: 47k€ ➡️ 99k€ ARR - We are getting good as sales, and have successfully convinced most companies we wanted to work with to sponsor us.
💸 Charges: 15k€ ➡️ 36k€ - We have increased our charges significantly this year by onboarding guest newsletter writers (14k€). The other charges are ads (12k€), SaaS (7k€) and virtual assistants (3k€).

Overall I think it has been a great 2024 year, looking forward to a promising future. I didn't reach my ambitious goal of 50k subscribers, but I'm not too far. After the summer, it became more challenging to grow, not sure why. I still reached another important symbolic milestone: having more newsletter subscribers than Twitter followers, becoming less dependent of social platforms.

In 2025, I'd like the newsletter to be more than just a list of curation emails. I plan to onboard guest writers, paying them to produce a series of articles on topics they are passionate about. If you think you'd be a great fit, reply and say hi! 👋

If you'd like to help me realize my plans, please share the newsletter with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it, or on any social platform.

As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

🦋 Bluesky
✖️ X / Twitter
👔 LinkedIn
👽 Reddit

Don't miss the next email!

If every newsletter was as informative, the world would be a better place!

Mike GrabowskiCTO and founder - Callstack

💸 Sponsor

Become a better engineer one newsletter at a time.

Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers improve their product skills.

With over 30k subscribers, it is a trusted source that bridges the gap between product and engineering, helping you ship products users love.

It covers topics like how to choose the right technologies, non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup, and A/B testing mistakes they learned the hard way. It’s totally free and always will be.

Subscribe for free.

⚛️ React

Building a dropdown

A great interactive article that shows how complex it can be to implement a flexible dropdown React component abstraction from scratch, covering triggers, positioning, focus traps, keyboard navigation, accessibility, and many other subtleties to consider.

Scaffolding your internatlization in React with automation

This article shows how you can use ts-morph AST transformations to automatically replace all your app’s hardcoded strings by react-i18next or react-intl translation APIs.

💸 React Native Zero to Hero - Everything you need to ship your first app
👀 React PR - “Forgive” IDE extension: The React Compiler team recently hinted at React Summit their intent to create a “React IDE” powered by the compiler, not limited to just linting but also providing educational tooltips and more. Well, there's nothing very interesting to see yet, but work has begun on scaffolding a Language Server Protocol and VSCode extension.
🗓️ Paris TypeScript La Conf' - 🇫🇷 Paris - 28 February - Full speaker line up just dropped! Join Mateusz Burzyński, Elise Patrikainen and David Rousset! Get 20% off tickets with code "TWIR"!
📜 You don't need Next.js: They migrated dashboards from Next.js 15 to just React with TanStack Router and Rspack with satisfying results.
📜 Building the Black Friday-Cyber Monday live dashboard: Vercel presents the technical architecture behind their Next.js-based Black Friday dashboard
📜 Replacing Legacy throw in React 19 with Suspense and use: There’s a new use() hook, but throwing promises still works.
📜 Remix Security Checklist
📜 Building a simple form in React - before and after React 19
📦 Astro 5.1 - Experimental sessions, remote image caching, getActionPath
📦 StyleX 0.10 - PostCSS plugin, better debugging, ESLint/Perf/CLI improvements: The new PostCSS plugin should make StyleX easier to adopt in various contexts.
📦 Fancy Components - Collection of funky, unconventional components
📦 next-intl 4.0 beta: type-safety for ICU params is really cool! Also lays the ground for the latest Next.js innovations like PPR, dynamicIO, and rootParams.
📦 React Router 7.1 - Support for Vite 6
📦 shadcn/ui CLI - Experimental monorepo support
📦 React Toastify 11.0 - Easy customization
📦 TanStack Store 0.7 - Derived/Effect classes
🎥 Theo - This magic hack makes Next.js possible: A great video explaining how Next.js implements PPR and Dynamic IO features using only JS features.
🎥 Theo - I might have a new favorite state manager (XState Store)
🎥 Lee Robinson - Forms with React 19 and Next.js
🎥 Ankita - Stop! These Next.js Mistakes are Killing Your App
🎙️ This Month in React - React 19 is here, 2024 is over

Don't miss the next email!

If you are not signed-up, you are missing out

William CandillonReact-Native animations expert - Youtuber

💸 Sponsor

React-admin: The Open-Source Framework for B2B apps

👩🏻‍💻 For developers, by developers: React-admin is a free, low-code library that accelerates the development of internal tools, admins or B2B apps. Unlike no-code tools, you use code, ensuring you’re never limited by the framework.

🔌 Flexible Integration: React-admin supports any API format (REST or GraphQL) and various authentication backends, including Auth0, Cognito, Google Auth, Active Directory, and Keycloak. You control the server, so there are no extra costs for Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities. It's fully themeable, allowing you to customize it with your company's colors.

🚀 Proven Success: Over 25,000 companies have built single-page applications with React-admin. For your next project, save weeks of development time by using react-admin. Try react-admin now.