A new project is always a joy: the code hasn't yet been bloated with deprecated features, rushed decisions and questionable dependencies. When my projects get to this state I become increasingly less productive and the urge to refactor grows exponentially, which, as you would imagine, halts any progress entirely.

There was a time when creating a web page meant creating an html file, yet nowadays it seems impossible to build any frontend without the bottomless pit of node_modules, yielding a finely chewed yet hefty bundle.xyz.js. Well, I got to learn that it might not be the case soon and, naturally, I feel the urge to share it with the rest of you.

I first heard of React when a friend showed me a project he had written. It was some sort of content management system: it had tables, forms, visual editors and stuff like this. I don't remember much, except that code was really really confusing