To educate myself and the community, I spend a lot of time reverse-engineering web technologies and writing about my findings. In the last year, I’ve focused mostly on Angular sources which resulted in the biggest Angular publication on the web — Angular-In-Depth. Now the time has come to dive deep into React. Change detection has become the main area of my expertise in Angular, and with some patience and a lot of debugging, I hope to soon achieve that level in React.

In React, the mechanism of change detection is often referred to as reconciliation or rendering, and Fiber is its newest implementation. Due to the underlying architecture, it provides capabilities to implement many interesting features like performing non-blocking rendering, applying updates based on the priority and pre-rendering content in the background. These features are referred to as time-slicing in the Concurrent React philosophy.

Besides solving real problems of application developers, the internal implementation of these mechanisms has a wide appeal from the engineering perspective. There’s such a wealth of knowledge in the sources that will help us grow as developers.