What the React? Engineers (in cars) talking React apps

One of the questions we often ask when using other web apps is “How was this built?” (i.e. “What the React?”) — everything from how the stylesheets are structured to how our clicks are tracked as we use the app.

To pay homage to the hundreds of React guides we’ve consumed, we thought we’d share a bit about how we build and maintain our own React apps. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive into how we built our developer dashboard and tackle questions including:

• How do you handle side effects (making API requests)?
• How do you manage state?
• How do you capture and act on exceptions?
• Where does event tracking fit in?
• What does your folder structure look like?
• How do you deploy your site?

Our goal is to give you a birds-eye view of how we think about React apps — so you can either (a) use our series as inspiration for your own web apps or (b) point out how you would have tackled a similar situation (both of which we’d consider to be positive outcomes of this series!).

Have a question you’d like us to tackle in a blog post? Let us know!

And finally, none of these posts will subtly try to get you to use the Smarcar API (we promise). But! Let’s say you wanted to know what our developer dashboard is used for and happened to have 5 minutes to spare… you could hypothetically run our demo app and check out the dashboard in the process 😉

To be continued!

Smartcar is the connected car API that allows mobile and web apps to communicate with connected vehicles across brands (think “check odometer” or “lock doors”).

Want to take our API for a spin? Check out our and .