
Hey guys,
Welcome to another edition of Import React by Cosden Solutions!
This week we’re diving into React’s new useContext guide, TanStack Router’s hidden superpower, and the Next.js 16 beta that’s shaking up the ecosystem. Plus, we’ll look at how Bun is becoming the “Rails of JavaScript”, why AI bugs aren’t like regular software bugs, and a developer’s bold take, “I’m not a rubber stamp for Copilot code.”
Let's get into the newsletter! 🤙
⚡️ The Latest In React
💰 One-Day Migration Saves Health App $2,300 Monthly
Stepler switched from Google Cloud to Sevalla and immediately slashed infrastructure costs by 78%, eliminated DevOps headaches, and kept 100% uptime. Their lead developer: "I would choose Sevalla from the very beginning." [ad]
📖 The Ultimate Guide to React’s useContext Hook
Tired of prop drilling in React? You’re not alone, passing state through layers of components that don’t even use it is a developer nightmare. This mess is exactly what useContext
was built to clean up. It's a built-in React hook that makes sharing state across components way easier. In this guide, you will learn how to master useContext
with TypeScript, through clear, step-by-step examples that feel like a live workshop.
⁉ Context Inheritance in TanStack Router
TanStack Router isn’t short on features, but one stands out big time, its ability to accumulate state between nested routes, not just at runtime, but also at the type level. That means type-safe, fully inferred state sharing across parent-child routes, and yes, it just works.
🆕 Next.js 16 (beta)
Next.js 16 (beta) is here, offering early access to big improvements across the board, from bundling to caching and routing.
Turbopack is now the default bundler, delivering 5–10x faster Fast Refresh and 2–5x faster builds
Built-in support for the React Compiler enables automatic memoization
Enhanced routing, smarter caching APIs, and a new Build Adapters API for customizing the build process
There are also breaking changes, including async route params and new defaults for next/image
.
Quick Links
Frontend devs working with large datasets (100k+ rows) in production, how do you handle it? (Reddit Thread).
Why the Best Engineering Teams Don’t Play the Blame Game.
How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator.
The Perils of Reactivity.
Transform FormData Between UI and Database in React Router.
🧠 AI & General Programming
🧹 Environment variables are a legacy mess
Environment variables are everywhere in software, but few developers really understand how they work, or where they come from. They seem simple, but beneath the surface is a quirky, outdated system that modern tools still rely on. From weird formatting rules to unexpected behavior across languages, there’s a lot more going on than just export VAR=value
. This deep dive uncovers how envvars actually work, and why you should care.
🐰 Bun 1.3 is live!
Bun just dropped its biggest release yet, and it’s not just a faster runtime anymore, it’s aiming to be the Rails of JavaScript. From built-in database clients to one-command full-stack scaffolding, Bun wants to unify the entire JS toolchain under one roof. No more npm install
, no more containers, just one binary to build, run, and ship. It’s ambitious, opinionated, and a little reckless… which might be exactly what JavaScript needs.
➡ How Stepler Cut Infrastructure Costs 78% in One Day
The health app migrated their entire stack from Google Cloud to Sevalla in 24 hours (vs. 3 months originally), dropped monthly hosting from $3K to $650, and freed their team from DevOps worries. See how they did it. [ad]
💼 Why your boss isn't worried about AI
Most people think AI systems break like regular software, they don’t. While bugs in traditional code can be traced, fixed, and forgotten, AI failures often come from massive, opaque datasets and can’t be reliably reproduced or patched. The core issue? We’re applying decades of hard-earned software intuition to a system that plays by entirely different rules, and it’s misleading us in dangerous ways.
🤖 I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code
A new Reddit post highlights a growing fear among developers: being reduced to passive approvers of AI-generated code. As some companies begin enforcing Copilot and LLM use as policy, even tying it to performance reviews, the role of the programmer starts to shift from creator to rubber stamp. If AI is doing the coding but humans still take the blame for bugs, who’s really in control?
🧪 How we test a web framework
Wasp is building a compiler-driven full-stack framework, and with that comes a complex testing challenge: every layer can break in its own creative way. From snapshot tests that catch subtle codegen changes to Playwright E2E tests on starter templates and example apps, Wasp treats test code with the same care as production. They’ve even started testing code snippets in the docs and automating tutorials with their in-house tool, TACTE.
This New React Hook Finally Fixes useEffect
In this video, I'm going to show you a new hook from React 19.2 that finally fixes useEffect dependency arrays. useEffectEvent allows you to create a callback function that does not have to be provided in the dependency array of useEffect, yet will still see the latest values of what it uses.
This is huge because it finally fixes one of the biggest problems that developers have had with useEffect dependency arrays. And it finally gives us an official stable solution from React to solve this problem!
See you next week!
Darius Cosden