Written by Suppose I want to display something on your screen. Whether I want to display a web page like this blog post, an interactive web app, or even a native app that you might download from some app store, at least two devices must be involved. Your device and mine. It starts with some code and […]
I wrote a bit of JSX in my editor: <p className=”text-2xl font-sans text-purple-400 dark:text-purple-500″> Hello, <i>Alice</i>! </p> Right now, this information only exists on my device. But with a bit of luck, it will travel through time and space to your device, and appear on your screen. Hello, Alice! The fact that this works is […]
Security is important. Nobody wants to be the person advocating for less security. So nobody wants to say it. But somebody has to say it. So I guess I’ll say it. The way npm audit works is broken. Its rollout as a default after every npm install was rushed, inconsiderate, and inadequate for the front-end […]
There are many articles written about React performance optimizations. In general, if some state update is slow, you need to: Verify you’re running a production build. (Development builds are intentionally slower, in extreme cases even by an order of magnitude.) Verify that you didn’t put the state higher in the tree than necessary. (For example, […]
The Don’t Repeat Yourself Wikipedia article states: Violations of DRY are typically referred to as WET solutions, which is commonly taken to stand for “write every time”, “write everything twice”, “we enjoy typing” or “waste everyone’s time”. But as any Phish fan can tell you, wasting time is actually good! A year ago, I gave […]
It was a late evening. My colleague has just checked in the code that they’ve been writing all week. We were working on a graphics editor canvas, and they implemented the ability to resize shapes like rectangles and ovals by dragging small handles at their edges. The code worked. But it was repetitive. Each shape […]
I started this decade as a first-year college student fresh out of high school. I was 17, didn’t have a job, didn’t have any industry connections, and really didn’t know shit. And now you’re reading my blog! I would have been proud. I’ve told bits and pieces of my story on different podcasts. Now feels […]
During my time on the React team, I’ve been lucky to see how Jordan, Sebastian, Sophie and other tenured team members approach problems. In this post, I’m distilling what I learned from them into a few high-level technical principles. These principles aren’t meant to be exhaustive. This is my personal attempt to formalize observations about […]
My previous post included this paragraph: let vs const vs var: Usually you want let. If you want to forbid assignment to this variable, you can use const. (Some codebases and coworkers are pedantic and force you to use const when there is only one assignment.) This turned out to be very controversial, sparking conversations […]