#512 – June 29, 2025
Understanding re-renders is crucial for performance
React re-renders
4 minutes by Serhii Shramko
Understanding re-renders in React is crucial for performance. You need to understand what triggers them. Know how they move through the app. Learn what happens during a re-render and why it matters.
React Zero‑UI
less than a minute by Austin Serb
Reactive state without re-rendering. Every setState in React triggers the full VDOM → Diff → Reconciliation → Paint pipeline. For pure UI state themes, menus, toggles that work is wasted. Using Zero-UI you can get 5-10× faster visual updates with no additional bundle cost
Connect any React application to an MCP server
8 minutes by Dina Kozlov
Cloudflare has open-sourced two tools for building Model Context Protocol (MCP) clients: use-mcp, a React library that simplifies connecting to remote MCP servers in just three lines of code, and AI Playground, a customizable chat interface for interacting with various LLMs. The use-mcp library handles connection management, authentication, dynamic tool discovery, and debugging capabilities, while maintaining compatibility with evolving MCP standards.
Prefer gaps to margins
5 minutes by Kyle Shevlin
Margins are applied to an element, either thru CSS or composition, and create a boundary around it such that the element itself can get no closer to any other element than the boundary. Gaps, on the other hand, are a way for a Flex or Grid container to space out the children it contains. Each gap is applied between adjacent sibling elements.
React Server Components in Expo
20 minutes by Jeferson Brito
The article explains how React Server Components work within Expo, introducing a new approach where certain components run on the server rather than the client. RSCs provide direct access to server-only resources like databases and file systems, with the rendered results streamed to the client.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: