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What React 19 Means for React Router with Brooks Lybrand

In this episode, Brooks Lybrand, Developer Relations Manager for Remix at Shopify, discusses the exciting new features of React 19 and how React Router bridges the gap for developers adopting the latest updates. Brooks explains how React 19's tighter integration with React Router simplifies development, enhances portability, and brings new paradigms to web development.

Brooks Lybrand, Developer Relations Manager for Remix at Shopify, joins Kent to explore the impact of React 19 on React Router and modern web development. In his talk "What React 19 Means for React Router," Brooks will highlight React 19's integration with server components, web component support, and simplified APIs for meta tags, links, and more. These updates promise to enhance developer experience and streamline app-building processes.

Brooks shares his insights on the evolution of Remix, Shopify's stewardship of the project, and the shift towards unifying React paradigms for better portability. He also discusses his passion for building communities, user feedback, and the importance of in-person connections for professional growth.

Watch this episode.

Meet Brooks at Epic Web Conf.

Guests

Brooks Lybrand
Brooks Lybrand

Transcript

Kent C. Dodds (00:00.878)
Hello everybody, I'm Kent C. Dodds and I'm joined by my friend Brooks Lybrand. Am I saying your last name right? I don't know if I've ever said it. Okay. Lybrand, okay, awesome. So Brooks and I met years ago as part of the remix community and Brooks actually spoke at, that was year one of RemixConf, right? Or was it year two? 23, yeah, okay, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brooks (00:08.86)
No, you get it. That's that's right. Most people say Lee brand. It's Lybrand. So thanks.

Brooks (00:24.884)
No, 23, yeah. I had an online talk, 22, yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (00:30.766)
And Brooks has just been a really important part of the Remix community since the very beginning and now is working as the Developer Relations Manager of the Remix team over at Shopify. Pretty much took my spot. So I took off from Shopify and then Brooks came in and filled in and expanded the role and you've just been doing a phenomenal job. Super happy with that and it's been a pleasure to know you and I'm so excited that you accepted the

Brooks (00:46.939)
Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (01:00.554)
invitation to come out and speak at Epic WebConf in March. with all of that out of the way, Brooks, could you give us an intro to yourself?

Brooks (01:09.652)
Thanks, Kent. Yeah. So yeah, my name is Brooks. I've been on the remix team for a little over a year now. Before that, I worked at like a grocery store in Texas called HEB and it was great as a developer. Yeah. I never actually got to be a bag boy. I had some friends who definitely worked there when they were in high school and whatnot. But yeah, it was really good just working at a company that you're delivering a website that serves millions of people every single day. It's maybe not the like.

Kent C. Dodds (01:20.118)
As a developer, think, right?

Kent C. Dodds (01:26.35)
Hmm.

Brooks (01:37.384)
you know, the coolest, sleekest kind of job, but you actually get to interact with real users. And the main priority is like actually letting people get their groceries, buy their food that they need to eat and live. And so that really gave me a good solid foundation of just what users expect and need. So I was always very much a remix enthusiast because I felt it solved problems that I had. And it helped me think about the web in a way that I didn't feel like...

Kent C. Dodds (01:46.446)
Hmm.

haha

Brooks (02:03.452)
the paradigm I didn't feel like I had before to think in terms of web standards and to think from how should things just work before JavaScript is there and then how do we enhance that experience? so that's why I love remix. And then, yeah, I got an opportunity, like you said, to talk at RemixConf 2023 about building community and running a meetup that I run in Austin. And so one thing led to another. Now I could actually do this for a full-time job, which is awesome.

Kent C. Dodds (02:26.838)
Yeah, and you're doing a terrific job. have to say like you run the week or let's see, is it bi weekly or monthly roadmap planning meetings or maybe it's less monthly.

Brooks (02:37.684)
Those have been monthly so far. Yeah, they've switched cadences a few times, but yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (02:42.412)
Yeah, yeah, so those have been awesome. The management of the Discord and the meetups and the newsletter and all of that. And then of course the docs probably takes a lot of your time. And the GitHub issues and everything too, like it's a lot. to be a maintainer of an open source project and community is a huge task. And I'm really grateful that Shopify saw the value in that and is.

Brooks (02:54.706)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (03:10.178)
paying the bills, because when I was there at Remix, we were just like, I sure hope we don't have to worry about paying bills once this VC money runs out. So Shopify is just, I don't know for you, because I left right about that time, but it seems on the outside. And then Shopify has been a really good steward of the project.

Brooks (03:23.529)
Mm-hmm.

Brooks (03:29.97)
Yeah, it's been super cool. I really didn't have a ton of like, knew who Shopify was roughly. I'd never actually tried to build my own store or anything. So I didn't have a ton of like context going in what to expect or anything, but yeah, they've been, they've been super awesome. There's like, it's a very high amount of trust, I think that they, that they give teams. And so like our team is really, they've, very much trusted us. They're not like, they interact with us. We, there's things built on top of react router and remix both just websites, like the,

admin, Shopify admin is built on React router, as well as Hydrogen, which is their own open source way to build a Shopify store. So there's definitely dependencies and ways that we naturally interact with them because they're dog feeding on top of our stuff. But then there's also just the aspect of like, we get resources from Shopify, not just in payment, but also just in some infrastructure and just then taking care of those things. But then we're also providing a lot of value to them just by building core tech and that core tech that everyone gets to use.

through our open source library. So it's been really cool so far. I was definitely honestly going into it. I was a little bit like, I don't know what this is gonna be. don't know if Shopify is gonna change, pull the rug out from under them, but I was so pleasantly surprised. That's been, yeah, it's been so easy and they've been really, really high trust. yeah, hopefully we're delivering and that's why it's high trust. I think that's the case. That's how I like to think of it. But yeah, they've been super cool.

Kent C. Dodds (04:29.708)
Hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (04:50.119)
Hahaha

Kent C. Dodds (04:54.894)
Yeah, I'm thrilled about that. with the recent release of React Router v7 and the merge of the Remix brand and React Router, and now React 19 is out, it's very, very exciting. Your talk is titled, What React 19 Means for React Router. And before I ask you about some of the specifics or to expand on that, a lot of people who are familiar with the Remix brand and React Router are going to ask the question,

what is going on with the Remix brand. I'm not gonna ask you to explain that, I'm just gonna tell people that they need to come to the conference and talk with you about it. How's that?

Brooks (05:30.654)
There you go. think that's a great idea. And then you'll come talk to me and I'll say, Hey, here's Ryan Florence. Go talk to him. So it'd be great. We'll just keep stringing along. I'm just kidding. Yeah, definitely. Please, please come to the conference. Love to talk about all those things. I imagine and hope that we have even more updates and more solid updates leading up to that and around that time. So I'm excited. I understand that. Yeah, there's people just always want to know what's coming. And we always want to know what the next new thing is. And yeah, definitely through people for a loop, giving up our branding, but

We gave it up for millions of apps and we still do have plans with Remix. We're definitely doing big things with it. But the goal was we saw a big gap for users of React Router to get to React 19. And we just saw that was a huge gap and we had a really good opportunity to help those people instead of just saying like, come over to Remix and all your problems will be fixed. Instead, we could meet developers where they're at and say, hey, we're going to try and make React Router better. We're going to make it really easy for you to opt into all these newer features, RSC.

know, server-side rendering, all that kind of good stuff just through React router. So, I don't know, it just felt like an opportunity we couldn't really give up just for the sake of some brand.

Kent C. Dodds (06:35.446)
Yeah, yeah, I think you did that absolutely the right thing. And people can come and ask what is happening to the Remix brand in the future at the conference. So with that, you talked about the bridge that React Router is for React 19. Can you expand a little bit on what it is you're going to be talking about?

Brooks (06:44.436)
Perfect.

Brooks (06:54.164)
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm gonna give it away a little bit that this is a little bit for sure conference driven development. I really need to learn a lot about React 19. I definitely know a lot of things, but I want to actually dive into it myself. But there are a lot of things I'm excited about. think one thing, like the obvious thing most people seem to be excited about is React Server components. And I definitely want to hit on those, but I also know there's gonna be so many other people probably do. There's already been like a million talks. I really don't want to give.

Kent C. Dodds (07:01.678)
You

Kent C. Dodds (07:15.022)
Mm-hmm.

Brooks (07:19.7)
the N plus one talk on what React Server components are and how you repaired that. Kent's already done that multiple times and it's been really great. So I definitely, will talk about that, but there's just so many other little features that I feel like get missed or maybe overlooked that I'm super excited to talk about. Just things that Remix had to do itself and have just gotten so much easier, such as meta tags and links and the way that you can inject your style sheets and whatnot have just gotten so much easier. So my favorite kind of talks are the talks where you're shown a bunch of complex code.

And then in the next slide, all the code melts away with this new magical API. And that's like very much what React 19 to me is for a lot of things. just makes building your app so much simpler. It allows you to do these paradigms that Remix had to create, you know, kind of, yeah, paradigms and APIs and stuff for, and a lot of that stuff melts away. And then on top of it, there's all these nice new goodies such as like web component support, which is super cool, and RSC, which is this totally new paradigm. So I'm excited to show both the cookies and just the like the nice little cleanup.

that you get with React 19.

Kent C. Dodds (08:20.91)
Yeah, yeah, think integrating more tightly with React is a really, really good thing because one of the things I really like about what React 19 has done by adopting features from frameworks like Remix is now the code that I'm writing, the React code I'm writing doesn't really look like a particular framework beyond React. And so I can transfer that knowledge to any framework that I'm using, any higher level framework like Remix or React Router.

And that transfer of knowledge is really valuable for the community.

Brooks (08:56.2)
Yep, I agree. mean, that was, that was the big sell of like React, think for a lot of people. And especially with things like React Native and all that stuff was, was to have that. And so, yeah, it was tough. Like when all the frameworks kind of started becoming a thing and you had the whole frameworks war and everything, it was frustrating to see like, don't, don't like that. There's like a next way to do this and a remix way to do this. If it all is reacted, I'd like it more often not to be pretty similar. there's obviously going to be differences basing based on like hosting providers and stuff. But again, if we're

Kent C. Dodds (09:00.352)
Mm-hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (09:14.893)
Mm-hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (09:19.715)
Mm-hmm.

Brooks (09:24.872)
If we're taking web fundamentals and those APIs as the core principle for so much of this stuff, that's how Remix works, then it should be portable in so many ways. I think we're losing that a bit in the React paradigm. There are flavors of React, and that's not ideal. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I'm glad there's a bit of a convergence in a sense that, yeah, it makes it easy to keep porting stuff around. But it's hard to get those primitives right, so I get that it took a bit of time to get to some consensus. But I'm really happy with where things are going. And yeah, hopefully.

Kent C. Dodds (09:49.314)
Yeah.

Brooks (09:53.588)
Hopefully we'll be able to show a way that that's valuable.

Kent C. Dodds (09:56.846)
Yeah, super. Well, I'm thrilled about that. I wanted to ask you also, so you gave a talk about community building at RemixConf in 23. You definitely attend conferences and give presentations and you spend a lot of time.

doing this kind of thing and I'm curious from your perspective as a conference or a meetup organizer and a attendee to various conferences and speakers, speaker at many conferences, what is the reason that you decide you want to do this sort of thing in person? Because we can kind of simulate that remotely, right? We can record a video and upload it, which you do, and we can do various online things. What is it about in person that is worth the effort?

Brooks (10:44.776)
Yeah, that's a really great question. I have, I probably have like too many answers to that question. So I'm trying to like distill it to a couple of things. Cause beginning honestly, like early on it was, it was very self-motivated of like, I wanted the opportunity to speak. I wanted, you know, to basically make myself a little bit more just known in the general ecosystem. So I could meet people, you know, get connections like to Kent and to Ryan and to Michael that I wouldn't have got before.

Kent C. Dodds (10:50.466)
Hahaha

Brooks (11:11.828)
And just those opportunities, but more and more recently, it's actually, it's very much shifted as I've, as I've grown as a developer and definitely a little bit more senior than I was when I started. It's much more to actually hear how other people are solving problems. Here, what other people's like real world problems are. Um, you certainly get that online, but no offense to all the popular sites like the orange site, whatnot. There, there definitely is a large noise to, uh, or yeah, noise to signal ratio. And so when, when you actually talk to real users, uh, a lot of the things that.

Kent C. Dodds (11:36.514)
Hmm.

Brooks (11:40.468)
on the internet, you're told that you're supposed to care about with your framework, whatever, kind of are very much in the back burner when you actually talk to someone, like, Hey, I'm just trying to, you know, use this library. And it's, really hard to install it. Cause for some reason I get this bug every single time. Um, you get those things are like, Hey, like, I think it's cool that like, you're maybe taking on this different, you know, data loading paradigm, but it honestly makes this, this pattern that we've had for a really long time, really hard. How should I be thinking about that? So I love it both. Yeah. Just from a user research standpoint, just from a

Kent C. Dodds (11:46.755)
Hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (12:06.509)
Hmm.

Brooks (12:10.078)
growing my own knowledge of like, what are the problems out there? What would it look like to be at another company if and when, you know, I'm done with this specific one. So I just love that. It's just more real. mean, like no offense to the internet, the internet is great, but there's a bit of a fakeness to it. And you don't really get that fakeness at a conference and especially not at a meetup because that is just that's straight up your neighbors that you're talking to there.

Kent C. Dodds (12:24.21)
huh.

Kent C. Dodds (12:30.828)
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I appreciate that. Now, when we're at the conference and meeting with those real people, what are the topics that people can come up and talk with you about that are like, will really get you excited and talking? Like, let's say there's a developer who sees you across the hall and they're like, I wanna go talk to Brooks. What's something that you would like them to come talk with you about?

Brooks (12:54.292)
Yeah, I mean, think the obvious and easy one is definitely going to be react to router and remix and all that good stuff. So I think that's, yeah, that's the super easy one. Feel free to ask me questions or, uh, throw out ideas or whatever. So I love that stuff. Um, but not some other things that I really care about. Um, my background is a little bit more in math and economics and, data visualization. So if that's like a niche that, that you care about, that's something I never get to talk about or think about. So I love talking about that kind of stuff and that very data heavy stuff.

But yeah, really all that programming stuff is great in general. yeah, especially our love and joy of React Router and Remix that we're trying to work on tirelessly. If you like it, we'd love to hear that. If you don't like it and have feedback that is actionable, I really want to hear that as well.

Kent C. Dodds (13:39.53)
I that. Yeah, I didn't realize that you had a background in economics. I bet you and Ryan have interesting conversations occasionally too about that stuff.

Brooks (13:47.056)
Occasionally he he forgot I told him a long time ago and then I brought it up and he's like you never told me that so I don't know he didn't even remember but yeah, he

Kent C. Dodds (13:52.91)
that's, I think Ryan sometimes has a selective memory. Well, so hopefully if he hears that he selects to not remember that I said that. Hey, thanks, Brooke, so much for giving us some of your time to talk about your talk and the things that you're looking forward to about the conference. I'm really looking forward to seeing you again in Utah in March.

Brooks (14:00.549)
man, yeah, that's great.

Brooks (14:08.144)
Yeah, hopefully.

Kent C. Dodds (14:20.3)
Just over two months away from the time we're recording this. It's gonna be a lot of fun to see ya

Brooks (14:23.08)
Dang, Thanks Ken, thanks so much for inviting me, appreciate it.

Kent C. Dodds (14:27.02)
Yeah. Bye everybody.

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