Kevin Van Cott
Senior Software Engineer / OSS Consultant
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
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I'm a Senior Software Engineer at RentVision and an Open Source Software Maintainer for TanStack. I've worked for various companies around the Lincoln and Omaha area over the years, have gotten very involved in OSS in the React ecosystem recently. If you need to build high-quality data grids and tables, I'm up for a "fun", long conversation.
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What the Heck is TanStack?
If you have been anywhere near the front-end JavaScript world lately, chances are you’ve heard whispers (or shouts) about something called TanStack.
But what the heck is TanStack?
TanStack, at is simplest, is a collection of NPM libraries for the JavaScript ecosystem that are like a Swiss Army knife for web developers. Libraries like TanStack Query, TanStack Table, TanStack Virtual, TanStack Form, TanStack Router, TanStack Start, etc. have been installed over 2 billion times over the past few years.
But what makes these TanStack libraries so special and beloved? In this talk, I want to share with you my journey from when I first discovered TanStack, to how I eventually became a core contributor and maintainer for some of the TanStack libraries.
I believe that TanStack adheres to a few core principles that make it successful, and that everyone can learn from to write cleaner and easier to maintain codebases. Let's take a look at how we can make use of declarative API design, composability, inversion of control, agnostic code modules, strong type-safety, and more!
Astro: The Ultimate JavaScript Framework?
With the overwhelming number of JavaScript frameworks available—Gatsby, Remix, Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Solid Start, TanStack Start, and many more—do we really need another one? Enter Astro, a framework that redefines the landscape with its innovative Islands Architecture, focusing on building high-performance, content-rich websites.
Astro combines blazing-fast performance with unparalleled flexibility, starting with 0 client-side JavaScript by default with customizable hydration enabled only where needed. Its framework-agnostic design lets you pick (or even mix) React, Solid, Svelte, Vue, (or almost any JavaScript library) or just plain HTML and Vanilla JS, while offering flexible rendering options like SSG, SSR, and CSR. With features like Markdown/MDX support, powerful CMS integrations, image optimization, view transitions, and pre-built themes, Astro delivers an exceptional developer experience. Powered by Vite, Astro is perfect for building modern MPAs deployable anywhere Node.js runs.
If you need to launch a website where content (SEO), performance (core web vitals), and interactivity are all of utmost importance, I believe there may be no better tool than this emerging framework. Let's take a look at what you can build with Astro!
Making TanStack Table Tree-Shakable
NPM Libraries that utilize the builder pattern such as Zod, Moment, or any of the TanStack libraries are usually loved for the great dev experiences that they provide out of the box by having easy to discover type-safe APIs. However, this pattern can often lead to downsides such as excessive JS bundle bloat if not architected correctly.
Are there better ways that we could be architecting our libraries that can still deliver great dev experiences while only bundling the JS that Apps actually use?
Join me on my journey from over the past year working on a TanStack Table rewrite that was partially inspired by another great library, Valibot. We'll explore how the TanStack Table codebase was ripped apart and put back together again in a way that is much more modular and tree-shakable, while maintaining the same great performance, builder patterns, and type-safety that developers expect from a great library.
React Fetching Patterns: From useEffect to RSCs
React is just one popular library of many in the JavaScript ecosystem that can be used to build modern applications. The thing is, even after you choose React, you will still be met with hundreds, if not thousands of more choices for how you want to architect your new app.
In this session, let's try to understand one thing very well: What are the different data fetching patterns throughout the massive landscape that is the React ecosystem, and what are the pros and cons of each for the type of application you want to build. We'll compare frameworks like CRA, Vite, Next.js, Remix, and more.
We'll take a look at how most of us started writing React apps, as client-side only Single Page Applications (SPAs), and what the best practices to build that kind of app can be. Then we'll take a deep dive into the big pendulum swing of moving React back to the server. Static-Site-Generation (SSG), Server-Side-Rendering (SSR), and React Server Components (RSCs, i.e. the newest trend) have a lot to offer in terms of capabilities, developer experience, and better resulting user experiences if used in the right situation.
By the end of this session, you should feel knowledgeable enough to choose right React flavor for your next app.
Performant SPAs with React Query
So you're building a React App, but your application is starting to feel slow, buggy, and it has loading spinners everywhere! When your users run into a bug, you just tell them to refresh the page to fix it. This is a situation that many React developers can probably relate to at some point in their career.
Data fetching in react applications has always been somewhat convoluted. React has traditionally only concerned itself with the "View" layer, which left the door wide open for many interpretations of what the best way to fetch data and manage state in a React application is.
Let's take a look at what many believe to be one of the best and most essential libraries in the React ecosystem, TanStack Query (a.k.a. React Query). TanStack Query is not just a data fetching library (in fact, it isn't at all). It is, first and foremost, a powerful asynchronous state management library, with the power to organize all of our fetching logic and most of our state management with an intelligent caching layer.
In this session, we'll explore all of benefits of using a library like React Query, and how we can use it to implement easy loading states, error handling, caching, pre-fetching, prevent excessive fetching waterfalls, and a lot more. All with the goal to show our users real data faster, without the need for so many loading spinners!
Kevin Van Cott
Senior Software Engineer / OSS Consultant
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
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