TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.
So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.
Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.
Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling that it is an Uber engineer's 20% project to learn some new tech.
So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable and full-fat than Ladle, but something simpler, less intrusive, and less "framework magic" than Storybook.
I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!
Thanks! Personally, I have immense respect for Storybook and the engineers behind it. It supports a dizzying amount of use-cases.
Having said that, however, I think that they did go too far down some paths that I would have liked to not see it go down. I feel like them supporting so many use-cases came at a cost of usability. In addition to this, there is quite obviously too much framework-magic, causing obscure undesirable behavior.
However, it's still an awesome tool. Just a little too full-fat for some of my more simpler use-cases :)
So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.
Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.
Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling that it is an Uber engineer's 20% project to learn some new tech.
So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable and full-fat than Ladle, but something simpler, less intrusive, and less "framework magic" than Storybook.
This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).
I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!