// the find
john-smilga/react-projects
A collection of 15 self-contained React mini-projects (birthday reminders, sliders, carts, cocktail lookup) tied to a Udemy course by John Smilga. Each project ships as two CRA apps: a blank `setup` folder and a completed `final` folder. It's for developers learning React hooks for the first time.
Each project isolates exactly one concept — useState, useEffect, useContext, useReducer — so you can study them in order without noise from unrelated complexity. The setup/final split is genuinely useful for following along: you get a working scaffold without having to copy-paste boilerplate. The project range covers the hooks that trip up most beginners (useReducer + context for cart state is the right thing to teach together). 5k stars with nearly 4k forks means the community has stress-tested the code; bugs in the final versions get spotted fast.
Every project is Create React App, which has been effectively abandoned since 2023 — running these today means dealing with deprecated dependencies and build warnings out of the box. The repo hasn't been touched since July 2024 and there's no migration path to Vite or anything current. Nothing here uses TypeScript, modern React patterns like server components, or any testing whatsoever — fine for a beginner course but you won't learn habits that transfer to production work. The advanced projects (16–23) are paywalled behind the Udemy course, so the repo as a standalone learning resource stops at project 15.