It turns out I wasn't the only one who wished this existed! I shared it on Twitter and Reddit, and got quite a bit of traction right away. At the end of June, it was ready for release. I spent the next couple of months building React Preview.
Intellij vs webstorm for react code#
June 2021: First release for Visual Studio Code
I was fortunate enough to have some savings, so it wouldn't be a completely irresponsible decision.
I quit my job in May 2021 to focus on React Preview, as it was next to impossible to make any progress when my mind was distracted by a thousand and one problems that had to be solved at work. I showed a demo to a few friends and colleagues, built a landing page to gather interest, then decided to build "React Preview" with the hope of releasing paid features a few weeks later (spoiler alert: it didn't happen). Why should developers keep context-switching between their code and their browser, clicking through their app to view the right component, when this could all be done in the IDE instead? I built a prototype, started playing around with it and realised this could be a game changer for web development. In fact, I didn't need Graphene at all anymore! When I started implementing a proof of concept, I quickly realised that there were already some great new tools out there such as Snowpack and Vite that could make my job much easier. I decided to call this project "React Preview". I thought I could use Graphene to generate instant previews of React components in an IDE. It first started in early 2021, when I was brainstorming ideas of potential applications for Graphene, a language-agnostic graph-based representation of code that I've been designing and writing a book about since late 2018. Preview.js is an extension/plugin for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ/WebStorm that helps developers preview any React, Vue or SolidJS component instantly in their IDE, without having to write code or spin up a local server. It's been a bit more than a year since I started working on Preview.js, so I thought I'd write about my journey so far.
0 kommentar(er)
