The Art of Writing Clean, Maintainable React Code
Our coding standards and practices that keep projects scalable and teams productive.
Clean code isn't just about aesthetics—it's about creating codebases that teams can understand, maintain, and extend over time. Here are the practices that keep our React projects scalable and our developers productive.
1. Component Composition Over Complexity
Keep components small and focused. If a component does more than one thing, break it down into smaller, composed components.
2. Descriptive Naming
Names should reveal intent. A developer should understand what a component or function does without reading the implementation.
3. Custom Hooks for Logic Reuse
Extract complex logic into custom hooks to keep components clean and enable reuse across your application.
4. Props Interface Documentation
Always define clear prop types or interfaces. This serves as documentation and catches errors early in development.
5. Avoid Prop Drilling
Use React Context or a state management solution for data that needs to be accessed by many components deep in the tree.
6. Consistent File Structure
Organize files by feature, not by type. This makes it easier to find related code and enables better code splitting.
7. Error Boundaries
Implement error boundaries to gracefully handle component errors and prevent entire app crashes.
8. Code Reviews and Linting
Automate what you can with ESLint, Prettier, and TypeScript. Use peer code reviews for architectural decisions.
Conclusion
Writing clean code is a skill that develops over time. These practices have helped our team maintain codebases with hundreds of thousands of lines of code while keeping development velocity high and bug rates low.
The goal isn't perfection—it's continuous improvement. Start with one or two practices and gradually adopt more as they become habits.