UI = f(data)(state)

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

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 tooling. Have you heard the story about the...

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 a conference talk,...

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 (such as a rectangle or an oval)...