React Round Up

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Paul Cowan was a painter and decorator for 30 years until he switched to front end development. He got into React because for him, much of programming didn’t make a whole lot of sense until he read about the flux model, and React Redux was one of the few frameworks that followed the flux model. Spending most of his life outside of the programming world has granted him a unique perspective frameworks like React. He talks about some of his frustrations with React hooks. Hooks can be frustrating because it’s a new paradigm to learn JS, the dependencies array can get bungled, React relies on the order in which hooks are called, and closures can be difficult. Overall, hooks come off at deceptively simple. Paul believes that we shouldn’t need external tooling to keep the dependency array on the right track. To avoid these frustrations, Paul reminds listeners that hooks have to be called in the same order each time at the beginning of your functional components. You also cannot have a hook in an if statement or even

Vitali Zaidman works for the WellDone Software consultancy. He has worked with a lot of different technologies, but currently works with React. In a recent React meetup, he talked about React performance. When someone says that React is not performant, Vitali disagrees and says that it is very performant unless you do certain things. If your React application is slow, it’s down to the tools you use. The panelists all agree that premature optimization is the root of all evil. The difference between premature optimization and good architecture comes down to experience. It is important to be data driven and consider performance a business environment. Vitali believes that performance is a feature and should be treated like any other.  The panel discusses accessibility versus internationalization. Launching to one language is different than launching to one set of abilities. While you don’t need to internationalize on day one, don’t make it impossible to internationalize. They talk about how creating a timeline

In this episode of React Round Up the panel interviews Chris Biscardi. Chris is now working with Gatsby. He shares a bit about his background and how he got into programming. Chris explains his move from Kubernetes and Docker over to Gatsby. His overall drive is to increase leverage for other people and what drew him to these projects.  Chirs explains what Gatsby is and what it has to offer to React developers. Gatsby is like a creat react app which is attached to a static site generator that has an API that allows you to pull in data from anywhere. Also, by using Gatsby developers do not have to operate alone, they get the whole Gatsby ecosystem to help them.  The panel considers Gatsby and if it would be a good way for developers to learn React. Chris explains with Gatsby’s documentation it would be great for learning React. The panel believes it would be a good place to learn because of the hands-on goal-oriented work engaged in when using Gatsby. Chris shares what developers get when using Gatsby and wh

Monica Lent has been interested in software from a very young age, and made her first domain name when she was 9 years old. She studied legacy languages Latin and Ancient Greek in university, but ended up keeping her college development job and going into software. She recently left her job and founded a startup, analytic tool designed for bloggers designed around affiliate marketing. She talks about some of the lessons she’s learned, including how to sift through data and how to make it useful for people.  Monica gave a talk at React Finland and she first applies some of her principles from that talk to what she’s learned founding a startup. One of the main differences she’s found is a small startup has different needs and levels of stability than a business. In early stage business, you have to decide where you want to invest in quality and where you shouldn’t be investing. For example, her primary focus is on her algorithm that runs the tool, and UI is less of a priority. In a large company, this might be

In today’s show, Chuck talks about the recent Twitter thread about 10x engineers. He goes through each of the points in the tweet and talks about each of them in turn. There are only two points he sort of agrees with, and believes the rest to be absolute garbage. One of the issues with this tweet is that it doesn’t define what a 10x engineer is. Defining a 10x engineer is difficult because it is also impossible to measure a truly average engineer because there are many factors that play into measuring productivity. Chuck turns the discussion to what a 10x engineer is to him and how to find one. A 10x engineer is dependent on the organization that they are a part of, because they are not simply found, they are made. When a 10x engineer is added to a team, the productivity of the entire team increases. Employers have to consider firstly what you need in your team and how a person would fit in. You want to avoid changing the entire culture of your organization. Consider also that a 10x engineer may be hired as

Dean Radcliffe has been web developing since the table tag was the new hotness. His interests include his wife and two kids, music, sports, and he likes to say he helps people make whatever they can dream of. Since starting to move towards the frontend, React has been his weapon of choice, which he got started with in 2014.  Dean works at G2.com, a software review site. They are developing a review form, which requires the code to react to events. For example, a person’s position in the company would affect what questions they see, so the form needs to react to which box is checked. Dean talks about the use cases for building a reactive form and what kind of things are going to happen when you fill in an input. For his form, the input will be remembered, and they want to increase the user’s involvement with the form through incentives. To accomplish this, Dean uses component driven development with Storybook. Storybook is a tool available for React and other frameworks, which lets you jump directly to each

Dinesh Pandiyan is a developer from India. He started as a backend engineer and then moved to frontend. Currently he is working for ThinkMill in Sidney, Australia. Today Dinesh and the panel are talking about devtools and progressive SSR. Dinesh got started with React Redux. The panelists talk about their experiences using primarily Redux for projects. Dinesh talks about his transition from backend to frontend and how it’s a totally different world. On the backend he was working in Java and it ran on a server, but on the frontend, code runs in a browser and the browser is very different for each user. Frontend development is tricky because you don’t know where your code is going to run. One of the trickiest parts of frontend development is debugging something in production. Unless you have good logging tools, you won’t know what’s going on. Debugging this stuff when it’s running on client browsers is hard, but when you’re in development mode your own browser you’ve got handy tools.  They talk about some of

Jeffrey Cross and Victor Savkin are the cofounders of NRWL. They used to work together at Google on the Angular team and started NRWL so that people could use Angular 2 well. Victor talks about NRWL’s tool NX, which came from the desire to help people develop like the tech giants. Companies like Google and Facebook develop in the same repository so that people can collaborate. NX is an open source tool for this collaborative development, known as a monorepo.  Monorepo style development is a way to develop applications such that you develop multiple projects in the same repository and you use tooling to orchestrate development. The tooling connects everything, makes the experience coherent, and ultimately makes the monorepo style work. The benefits of monorepo development are that the tool chain enables you to interact with different projects in the same fashion, collaboration is more effective, and multiple apps can be refactored at once.  The panel discusses what situations are appropriate for a monorepo a

Zain Sajjad is a frontend developer at his company Peekaboo Guru, an app built in React. The show begins with Zain explaining why he chose to build Peekaboo Guru in React. Ultimately, he chose React for its composability and reusability. He talks about how much data is shared between his React and React Native applications. Zain explains what he means by a container since he is not talking about Docker, and how he has the app organized. He talks about the differences between routing and navigation between React and React Native. When approaching these differences, he breaks things down into components, containers, and platform, paying careful attention to how they work together. This differentiation can actually help a lot with testing as well.  The panel asks Zain about choosing between React navigation and React Native navigation, but Peekaboo Guru uses both React navigation and React Native navigation, but on different platforms. They use each on different platforms because React Native doesn’t let you c

Episode Summary Today’s guest is Farzad Yousef Zadeh, a developer from Iran with a unique path into computer programming. He started by studying astrophysics and aerospace engineering in college, then dropped out in his last semester because it wasn’t the right path. He then taught himself to code, working mostly in web programming and frontend development. Despite his change in course, Farzad remains passionate about observing the night sky.  Farzad is here today to talk about the ideas in his talk Explicitness and Consistency in UI, where he talks about the difficulties of developing a user interface and how the experience can be improved by using state machines and state charts. He talks about his inspiration for the talk and how he has implemented state machines and state charts into his work.  The panel backtracks and talks about the definition of state machines and state charts. A state machine, from an academic background, is a model for computing something. It's for managing and controlling, taking

Episode Summary Today’s guest is Håkon Krogh, and the panel is discussing his talk on lightning fast SSR React apps given at React Amsterdam. He gives a brief overview and defines his use of the Uncanny Valley (called the Valley of Lies in his talk). In this instance, the Uncanny Valley in programming occurs when everything in a website or application looks great, but none of the buttons work or users simply can’t connect. This is especially common when users try to connect to a site or app with their cell phone rather than a computer. The panel discusses what can be done. It’s important to begin by measuring the lag in your applications. Designing the progressive loading experience first is suggested as a solution, as well as organizing what loads first and using React and HTML for different parts of the app. It’s important to realize that some tools don’t work in every situation. The panel talks about the merits of Next.js.  Next they talk about what kinds of applications require SSR that make the loadin

Episode Summary Andrey Okonetchnikov is a specialist in frontend architecture and design systems. He runs his own consultancy and made the package lint-staged. Andrey has been in programming for 20 years and talks about his background, how he got into React, and why he started component-driven.io. Andrey has always been interested in design tools and design systems, it just wasn’t the right time because the right tools weren’t available.  Since Andrey has been working in frameworks for 20 years and has watched them come and go, Lucas asks Andrey how he has seen the communication between developers and business owners evolve over that time. Andrey reflects on his first conference talk and believes that not much has changed, even if the tools have. His perfect interaction between developers and business owners would be codeless, and would instead draw his design on a napkin.  This idea ties into Andrey’s ideas of creating things in primitives instead of wireframes. He relates his idea to the pattern philosop

Sponsors React Native RadioSentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan GitLab | Get 30% off tickets with the promo code: DEVCHATCOMMIT Panel David Ceddia Lucas Reis With special guest: Jamon Holmgren Episode Summary Today’s guest is Jamon Holmgren from Oregon. Jamon is the the CTO for Infinite Red, a consultancy that designs and builds mobile apps. The show starts with Jamon talking about his background in coding, which goes all the way back to when he was 12 years old. The panel brings up his React Finland presentation on building a community around Ignite. Ignite is a plugins and boilerplate maker for React that can speed up app creation. Jamon talks about how it works and how it came about. The panel believes this to be an excellent product that will contribute to code quality and doesn’t contribute to the jumble of boilerplates out there.  Since Infinite Red engineers work on both web and mobile applications, Jamon talks about how they navigate

Sponsors Adventures in DevopsSentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan My JavaScript Story Panel David Ceddia Thomas Aylott Leslie Cohn-Wein Lucas Reis With special guest: Bruno Lourenco Episode Summary Bruno is a developer specializing in multimedia. He is currently building websites with React and the creator of React Morph, an animation library. Bruno talks about what React Morph is, how it originated, and the flip animation technique. React Morph is uniquely designed to be compatible with many platforms. Bruno talks about his goal to make everything simpler, from having animations on your website, to making things easier for users of the application.  The panel discusses the importance of animation and how it relates to user accessibility. They discuss how animation is interpreted in the brain to create meaning and purpose. On the other hand, it can be easy to go overboard with animation and can even make people feel sick. Since

Sponsors NetlifySentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Panel David Ceddia Thomas Aylott Leslie Cohn-Wein Lucas Reis With special guest: Shawn Wang Episode Summary Today’s guest Shawn Wang is a career changer starts off the show about how he got from finance to programming. The panel talks about how they each got started in programming. Shawn explains his Learn In Public manifesto. They discuss the benefits of learning in public and how concepts like Cunninham’s Law and lampshading can be a good thing. Shawn talks about the differences between inbound and outbound marketing. The two biggest benefits of learning in public is that people will come to help you, it helps you to build capital, and it os the fastest way to learn. They discuss the balance between sharing too little and oversharing.   Leslie brings up some possible safety concerns, and the panel discusses ways to stay safe while learning in public. Ultimately, it’s ok to

Sponsors NetlifySentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Panel Thomas Aylott David Ceddia Lucas Reis With special guest: Christoffer Niska Episode Summary   Christoffer Niska has been in web development for over a decade and works with mainly PHP and JavaScript, but knows about 8 different languages, often working in multiple languages simultaneously. The panel discusses the affect learning another language has on how you write the code you’re working on. They talk about TypeScript and Christoffer shares how he got into it. They discuss the prevalence of TypeScript and some of the tools available for it, like Fable.io. TypeScript is a very beneficial language because it can help with refactoring and automation. Christoffer believes that it is better to write libraries in TypeScript. He shares how to release an NPM package with Typescript. They talk about more tools that work with TypeScript. The panel talks about Reason ML, which is an alt

Sponsors NetlifySentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Panel Thomas Aylott David Ceddia Lucas Reis With special guest: Daishi Kato Episode Summary   Todays guest Daishi Kato is a freelance programmer and has many open source libraries. He starts off by talking about how he got from tail call optimization to Redux and global state. Daishi talks about his definition of global state, how it differs from a regular state, and why it is a problem with the current context implementation. Thomas talks about his work with Android and how React has helped solved some of the problems they encountered. They talk about when different rendering issues they’ve encountered. Daishi shares his unique approach to solving rendering issues and how it applies to his libraries. His solution is to combine the system in React with proxy based tracking to solve issues with rendering. Daishi explains why this works and th

Sponsors NetlifySentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Panel Lucas Reis Thomas Aylott Episode Summary   Today, Lucas and Thomas discuss how companies enforce what technology gets used, especially when companies get really large. Thomas talks about his experience with Facebook’s an ‘all carrots, no sticks’ approach, and says that if Facebook hadn’t given its employees the freedom to use whatever technology they needed, React would have never come about. Thomas talks about how he built his 2018 React Conference talk. He says that the hard part of being a programmer is not the technical aspect, it’s the social aspect and balancing the old and new. Lucas talks about his experience as a consultant, the path from analyst to manager, and how things change. Thomas brings up Facebook’s philosophy of “abstraction through extraction”. Thomas and Lucas agree that in the real world, it’s really difficult to have linear/boolean things, and as a result there is n

Sponsors NetlifySentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus Panel Lucas Reis David Ceddia Leslie Cohn-Wein With special guest: Glenn Reyes Episode Summary Special guest Glenn is a software programmer based in Vienna, Austria and has been working in programming since 2013. He is the creator of the Graphpack library. Today the panel discusses how to choose between picking a 3rd party or handcraft component in React. They discuss the popular notion to avoid “reinventing the wheel” and always using 3rd party components. Glenn gives advice on approaching the decision between 3rd party components or making it yourself, including considering time constraints, risks of using premade components, and the popularity of the library and how up-to-date it is. It is also important to understand the big picture of your project and know what already exists that could be of use. The panel discusses different indicators