If you have been learning React you would probably came across the state word being used all over the place. The heart of every component lies in its “state”! But … what is this state we keep hearing about?

The plan for this article is to show you how native CSS variables work, and how you can use them to make your life a bit easier. As your web apps grow bigger, the CSS becomes big, redundant and many times messy. Used within a good context, the CSS variables, give you the mechanism to reuse and easily change repeatedly occurring CSS properties.

I recently had a few conversations with some readers of JS Craft about what would be a good approach for them to start learning React. But before that, before getting to the master plan of learning React, let's do a bit of reverse psychology:

I am lazy, by default. Learning something new takes effort and time. So, I always start by asking “why should I learn this? How this insert here: framework, library, programing language will make my life easier?”

Recently I had to hold a React workshop for some developers from a company I am working with. Some of them were juniors and others where experienced backend devs, but, to my surprise, there were some common issue patterns that kept repeating for both categories. So, I’ve decided to make a list of these common mistakes hoping it will save you some moments of frustrations when you first start to learn React:

What is GraphQl and why should I be interested in it? In a nutshell, we can see GraphQL as a syntax that describes the data you get, usually from a backend API. It was created by Facebook and in most cases, it provides good solutions to REST API's problems.

If you are in the React world there are some pretty high chances you may have heard about Mobx. Mobx is a lightweight and easy to learn state management library developed by Michel Weststrate.