React Digest
React Digest
#561 – June 14, 2026
solves common data fetching problems like race conditions, repeated loading states, and wasted network requests
A gentle introduction to TanStack query
22 minutes by Neciu Dan
TanStack Query solves common data fetching problems like race conditions, repeated loading states, and wasted network requests through a shared cache. Setting it up takes just a few lines, and its built-in defaults like retries and background refetching handle most edge cases automatically. For larger apps, tools like queryOptions and code generation from OpenAPI schemas remove repetitive boilerplate. Features like parallel queries, infinite scroll, and optimistic updates cover nearly every real-world use case.
React Data Grids: A Practical Comparison
sponsored by Progress Telerik
We benchmarked three leading React data grids under enterprise-scale data loads, comparing virtualization, rendering performance, accessibility, and feature depth to help you find the right fit for your next application.
Building an active NavLink component in Next.js
21 minutes by Aurora Scharff
Aurora explains how to build a reusable active navigation link component in Next.js. She shows how to highlight the current page, support loading states, improve accessibility, and handle nested routes. Her guide compares different routing approaches, adds TypeScript support, and addresses performance issues such as flickering and Suspense requirements, helping developers create a flexible and user-friendly navigation system.
Conductor rewrite: What they changed to make it fast
14 minutes by Dennis Brotzky
Dennis describes how Conductor improved its desktop app’s performance. The team adopted a local-first architecture, enhanced React rendering, virtualized chat interfaces, switched from Node to Bun, and optimized background tasks. These changes reduced lag and startup delays. Careful profiling, stable state management, and continuous testing helped deliver a faster, smoother user experience.
Performance is not a technical problem
5 minutes by Shu Ding
Shu says performance doesn't degrade because engineers are careless. It degrades because codebases grow faster than any person can track, and abstractions hide costs that only appear in production. She argues the real problem is entropy: the slow, invisible spread of patterns no individual has enough context to catch. The fix isn't better discipline or smarter tools. It's building systems that encode hard-won knowledge and apply it consistently, every time, without fatigue.
How React server components integrate with Bundler
6 minutes by Sankalpa Acharya
React Server Components split an app into two separate builds at compile time. The server build replaces client components with lightweight stubs that just register a reference, so the server never runs browser code like hooks or event handlers. The client build then compiles those components normally and produces a manifest linking references to real files. During rendering, the server emits a stream describing the UI, and the browser uses that manifest to load and fill in the client parts.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: