Leveling Up in React: My Journey with Advanced Hooks

For the first few months of learning React, I lived in a comfortable world defined by two hooks: useState and useEffect. They were my hammer and screwdriver, and I used them for everything. But as the application for my capstone project grew, I started hitting walls. My state logic became a tangled mess, components were re-rendering for no reason, and I was repeating the same patterns over and over.

This forced me to venture beyond the basics and into the world of “advanced” hooks. They seemed intimidating at first, but I soon realized they weren’t just complicated—they were solutions to the very problems I was facing.

The useState Spaghetti and How useReducer Saved Me

My first big problem was a complex form. I had a dozen useState calls to manage the form’s values, errors, and touched states. It was a nightmare to read and even worse to debug.

Then I discovered useReducer. I’d always associated it with Redux and complex state management, but it’s perfect for this exact scenario. Instead of a dozen set functions, I had one dispatch function and a single reducer that handled all the state transitions in a clean, predictable way.

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// Before: A mess of useStates
const [name, setName] = useState('');
const [email, setEmail] = useState('');
const [nameError, setNameError] = useState(null);
const [emailError, setEmailError] = useState(null);

// After: Clean and predictable with useReducer
const [formState, dispatch] = useReducer(formReducer, initialState);
// dispatch({ type: 'SET_FIELD', field: 'name', value: 'Zack' });

My takeaway: If you have a piece of state where the next value depends on the previous one, or if multiple state variables change together, useReducer will make your life infinitely better.

My App Was Slow, and useMemo & useCallback Were the Cure

I hit a point where a core component of my app felt sluggish. I’d type in one input, and the whole thing would lag. After some debugging, I realized that on every keystroke, a complex data-filtering function was running, and child components were re-rendering unnecessarily.

This led me to useMemo and useCallback.

• useMemo became my tool for expensive calculations. I wrapped my filtering logic in useMemo, telling React to only re-run the calculation if the source data or the filter query actually changed. The lag disappeared instantly.
• useCallback was for function props. I was passing a handler function to a child component. Because the function was being redefined on every render, the child component thought it was getting a new prop every time and re-rendered. Wrapping the handler in useCallback ensured that the function reference stayed the same unless its own dependencies changed.

My takeaway: These hooks are not for premature optimization. But when you have a real performance bottleneck, they are the precision tools you need to fix it.

The Magic of Custom Hooks: Don’t Repeat Yourself

This was the biggest “level up” moment for me. I noticed I had the same data-fetching logic in three different components: a useState for data, one for loading state, and one for errors, all wrapped in a useEffect. It was classic copy-paste code.

The solution was to create my own hook: useApi.

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function useApi(url) {
  const [data, setData] = useState(null);
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true);
  const [error, setError] = useState(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    // ... all my fetching, loading, and error logic
  }, [url]);

  return { data, loading, error };
}

Suddenly, in my components, all that complex logic was replaced by a single, beautiful line:

const { data, loading, error } = useApi('/api/users');

It was a revelation. I started seeing opportunities for custom hooks everywhere: useDebounce for search inputs, useLocalStorage for saving user settings, useEventListener for window events.

My takeaway: Custom hooks are the single most powerful pattern in React for writing clean, reusable, and maintainable code. If you find yourself writing the same logic in multiple components, it’s probably time to create a custom hook.

Moving beyond the basic hooks was a turning point. It taught me that React provides a complete toolkit for managing complexity. These advanced hooks aren’t just nice-to-haves; they are the key to writing professional, scalable React applications.