I built my first hook a few months ago, and figured I should get it up on the blog. It's a replacement for a Higher Order Component that exists in a codebase I'm working on. That HoC passes a breakpoint to a component that dictates how the component renders across different breakpoints.

If you want to play around with the component, you can find it on Code Sandbox. I'll also briefly walk you through how it works.

The first thing useBreakpoints does is set set the state. useState lets you use React local state even when you're not in a class. To use it, you destructure an array, in which the first argument is whatever you want to call it, and the second lets you update the state (much like this.setState).

In this hook, when a user resizes the screen, I set a new width on state with the setWidth function inside of useEffect. useEffect lets you use something like lifecycle methods when you're not in a class. In other words,I reset the state with a new width. Then, I pass that new width to my setBreakpoints function, which returns the correct breakpoint based on the size of the browser window.