The need for isolated component development

Isolating React components during development can be difficult. Often, the only context available to developers and the React components that they're making is the application itself. Rarely do things go exactly as planned while a component is being developed. Part of the debug process for a React component is, well, playing with it.

I often find myself doing weird things in application code to accommodate for temporary changes that we make to components as I troubleshoot problems. For example, I'll change the type of container element to see if this is what's causing the layout issues that I'm seeing; or, I'll change the markup that's internal to the component; or, I'll completely fabricate some state or props that the component uses.

The point is that there are random experiments that you're going to want to perform over the course of developing component. Trying to do this within the application that you're building can be cumbersome. This is...