MDN, State, and HOCs

MDN’s documentation is a foundational resource for web developers. Its fate impacts us all, and so this announcement from Mozilla’s Rina Jensen is worth reading. To summarize: “[B]ecause of Mozilla’s restructuring, we have had to scale back our overall investment in developer outreach, including MDN.”

This outstanding website, edited by Dominic Nguyen and Tom Coleman, offers a thorough, community maintained introduction to the popular prototyping tool Storybook. I’m looking forward to digging into this soon.

I find cold showers– the pragmatism that comes from knowing a tool inside and out and deeply understanding its flaws– extremely valuable. In this video, Harry Wolff shares the downsides of GraphQL, pointing out hidden complexity, a challenging DSL, and new problems created by new solutions.

Reddit user namywamy asks: “Are there any large open source repos out there that demonstrate well written React code at the production/business level?” This is an important question for people learning React, or looking for best practices to aspire to. The comments include several recommendations.

In this excellent talk from React Rally 2020, Kent C. Dodds explores an evergreen React discussion topic: state. Through live-coding and slides-in-the-IDE, Kent demonstrates the tradeoffs of a variety of state-management patterns and anti-patterns, including lifting state, prop-drilling, and Context.

A higher-order component (HOC) is an advanced technique in React for reusing component logic. In some codebases I’ve worked on, they are very common. To quote the docs: “ We want an abstraction that allows us to define this logic in a single place and share it across many components. This is where higher-order components excel.”