[testguy34]

> It's insane that people think you need to do all this just to get a live updating counter.

Dismissing this guy's tutorial because he didn't clone Facebook is kind of short sided. Everything is about trade offs. You don't need to make your React app isomorphic if you don't mind a slower initial load and lack of SEO. You don't need to use Mongo, you can pass data from your RDBMS directly to your components as props when you render server side or have them call your REST API using an isomorphic request library. You don't need to use ES6 if you use something like webpack and babel.

[petewailes]

Don't get me wrong, it's a massively comprehensive piece of work. I'm jealous of the author's chops - they know more about this than I do. But after all this time writing applications small and large, doing isomorphic JS dev feels like a massive step back.