This is going to be a short article and an opinionated one. React team introduced hooks in release 16.8. Now, even after 2+ years, the main documentation still is primarily class based, with Hooks are tucked away as an advanced topic. I wonder why. We’ve been developing several large React…

A good strategy can eliminate several classes of bugs — According to the paper The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks, developers are optimists and I agree. Most of us tend to focus on the happy path of a feature, working within the warmth of hot-reloads, VSCode and Chrome dev tools, trusting the APIs to always work and assuming that…

Back to basics — Writing conditionals — Case 1. Simple if / else if / else blocks if (mode === "A") { return { isDisabled: true }; } else if (mode === "B") { return { isDisabled: true }; } else { return { isDisabled: false }; } This is a common pattern that we see in applications. However, it is ripe for future spaghetti like updates…

Use the “unknown” type — TypeScript provides a certain comfort that nowhere will your functions or components be invoked with the wrong input, your code is always checked statically as you write. However, most applications have some kind of server-side API that drives its state; at this point, TypeScript is not in play because the…

For React devs, it is not hard as you think — A few years ago, I started seeking simplicity and minimalism in everything. It reflected in my work too. So, when the TypeScript “hype” started, I simply shut myself out to it because adopting it seemed like a huge undertaking and it would disturb my zen. It would take a year…

Happy and focused developers write better code — There are no ideal software projects. Challenges are plenty, caused by technology and people. But I believe that if you provide a fantastic developer experience, you end up creating a higher quality product. Bugs are a manifestation of lack of knowledge, confusion, short cuts, bad practices and over dependence on…

You don’t have to. Leave it to Prettier. — Search online about using nested ternaries and you will see varying degrees of approvals. IMO, nested ternary expressions are compact and a better alternative to using if/else. Let us take a fictitious large if else condition: const pageName = (index, state) => { if (index === 0 && state…

Forming the correct mental picture of an important tool — In my experience, a lot of developers write the reduce function with a mental model of its semantics. It is approached as a boilerplate-y function. A reduce function kinda gets booted like this in the code: data.reduce((acc, item) => { // do the thing; // return something }, initialValue); All…