nanoid VS React

nanoid – A library for generating short, unique IDs (like NxWDZ-j95C).

The demo application we’re going to build in the following sections is a to-do app with a REST API backend that allows multiple users to log in. It also allows those users to create, check, and delete their to-dos. Apart from the Node.js runtime, this project will use Express.js for the server, bcrypt to hash passwords, and nanoid to generate random IDs.

CURRENT_CLIENT_ID is the random unique string Id generated by nanoid that gets generated whenever the client is opened on the brower’s tab.

Last thing left is to use our new upload function in our server action. Since I like to upload images in single format and have some more control over them, I will additionally use sharp library. For file name, I'll generate some random string using nanoid:

Our API is in node. And God, how I suffered to import nanoid in an esmodule project. I had to vendor it, since using a previous version was not ideal. With bun, we can no longer worry about that. Just import what you need and done.

No thread about UUID is complete without a plug for NanoID! https://github.com/ai/nanoid/blob/main/README.md

Generate a unique file name using the nanoid library.

The syntax should read similar to SQL itself. We’re using a Python port of nanoid to generate our IDs. There’s only one thing missing… how do we actually create the table?

Official React Documentation: react.dev MDN Javascript Documentation: developer.mozilla.org/JavaScript

Early in my career, I struggled to understand how React’s state updates actually worked. Docs gave me the basics, but edge cases around batching were confusing. One weekend, I pulled up the React source code on GitHub and traced how state changes bubbled through the scheduler. Suddenly, the “weird bugs” I hit at work made sense because I wasn’t guessing anymore, I’d seen the engine.

3. Next.js and React (Frontend framework)

My primary passion is backend development, but I wanted to build a user-friendly frontend to complete this project. Given my experience with React, Next.js was the obvious choice due to its excellent documentation and ease of use.

Check out the React 19 Upgrade Guide for more details. Have fun coding, and share in the comments what you’re building with React 19! 🎉

React Official Documentation — Start here for official guides and tutorials

At IVAO, we partially follow micro-services best practices. This means each business group (e.g., Flight tracking, Flight planning, Air Traffic controlling, Training) has its own NestJS API and ReactJS frontend. But we took a shortcut on the DB side, as we have quite some references across systems, especially for user IDs, airports, etc... We decided to have a single MariaDB instance while having a dedicated logical database for each API, so we still have a separation of concerns but we can guarantee data integrity with foreign keys across those databases.

React.js (fast, large ecosystem)

Tools: V0 by Vercel, shadcn/ui, React, Tailwind CSS V0 turns natural language prompts into ready-to-use React + Tailwind UI code. Ask for “a responsive SaaS dashboard with a dark theme and collapsible sidebar” and you get production-ready code instantly, accessible, tweakable, and not locked into rigid templates.