The Secret Sauce to Building Better React Apps: How API Middleware Can Transform Your Development Process

Vasil Rashkov
4 min readAug 27, 2024

If you’ve been building React apps for any length of time, you know the feeling. That creeping complexity. The endless parade of API requests scattered across your components like confetti after a parade. Debugging becomes a nightmare, and maintaining your code feels like you’re tiptoeing through a minefield.

But what if I told you there’s a way to tame this beast? A way to manage API calls with elegance and grace while boosting the security, performance, and maintainability of your app? It’s called API middleware, and it’s about to become your new best friend.

The Pain of Scaling a React App

Let’s be real — managing API calls in a growing React app can turn into a dumpster fire real quick. You start off with a few fetch requests in your components, no big deal. But then your app grows. You add more components, more API calls, more state management complexities. Before you know it, you’re drowning in a sea of network requests, error handling, and asynchronous logic that’s about as intuitive as trying to read a novel in the dark.

The more your app grows, the more you realize the need for a better way to handle all of this. That’s where API middleware comes in.

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Vasil Rashkov

Senior Software Engineer. Running a software agency on the side.