Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
React for Angular Developers: Library or Framework, Mental Model Differences and the Ecosystem Map
React is a UI library, not a framework: it gives you components, state and rendering, while the team picks routing, data fetching, forms and global state from the ecosystem. We write Bookstore's book card side by side in Angular and React, show with real output that one click makes React call the component function again yet change only two text nodes in the DOM, and map Angular concepts to their React counterparts in a table.
Your First React Project: Vite + TypeScript, Project Structure, StrictMode and React DevTools
We build a project skeleton for the series with Vite's react-ts template, feature folders, an @/ alias from a single source via Vite 8's resolve.tsconfigPaths, Oxlint's hook rules and a dev proxy that forwards /api requests to the Bookstore API. With real output we show that StrictMode renders twice and runs effects setup-cleanup-setup in development while the production build runs everything once, and that without the proxy the browser refuses to read the response because of CORS.
Finishing the Bookstore SPA End to End: Feature Folders, Authentication, Environments and Deployment
Getting a React SPA ready for production means guarding feature boundaries with a lint rule, knowing that VITE_ variables are written into the bundle at build time so secrets stay out of the browser, and handing the session to a BFF that uses an HttpOnly cookie instead of a token. We add a small ASP.NET Core and YARP BFF to Bookstore and show the sign-in flow, the SPA fallback, cache headers, an nginx config and bundle analysis with real output.