React Experience
Component-driven frontends for full-stack apps that need to feel fast and bespoke.
Overview
How I've used React
React is my go-to whenever a project outgrows what WordPress can comfortably do — real-time interactions, complex state, or a UI that needs to feel like a native app rather than a page that reloads.
The clearest example of this in my portfolio is RoadDarts.com, a business-discovery platform I built end-to-end with React on the frontend. The brief needed live map filtering, proximity search, and instant UI updates as users adjusted filters — exactly the kind of interaction model that fights against a traditional CMS. I structured the app around reusable components and custom hooks for the map logic, search state, and API data fetching, which kept the codebase maintainable as the feature list grew. Sub-2-second load times were a hard requirement, so component-level code splitting and careful re-render management mattered as much as the feature work itself.
What I can do
Specific React capabilities
- ✓Functional components with Hooks — useState, useEffect, useMemo, custom hooks
- ✓Context API and prop-driven state management for small-to-medium apps
- ✓Component architecture that stays maintainable as feature count grows
- ✓Integrating third-party APIs (Google Maps, payment gateways, REST services)
- ✓Performance optimization — code splitting, memoization, render profiling
- ✓Pairing React with Node.js/Express backends for full-stack MERN apps
FAQ
Common questions about my React work
When does it make sense to use React instead of WordPress?+
When the product needs real interactivity that a CMS can't deliver cleanly — live filtering, dashboards, booking systems with dynamic logic, or anything where the UI state changes faster than a page reload can keep up.
Do you build the backend too, or just the React frontend?+
Both — I work the full MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js), so I can take a project from database schema through to the deployed UI without handing off between specialists.