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Panel

Nader Dabit
Justin Bennett
Lucas Reis
Dave Ceddia
Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guests: Thomas Aylott, Conlin Durbin

Episode Summary

Conlin Durbin is a front end software engineer for a company called Lessonly and occasionally writes about React. Thomas Aylott is a web guy from the 90’s who was briefly on the React team, and he makes thingsthatdostuff.com and groovytiesquad.com. The panel discusses  Conlin’s article Link Lists in the Wild: React Hooks. They begin by talking about the relationship between linked lists and React hooks. Linked lists are used under the hood to render hooks every time that they’re created and maintain integrity of the hook chain.

They discuss the importance of knowing what goes on under the hood share their methods of learning. They give tips for learning on the job. The panel agrees that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Conlin shares his experience working for Lessonly, a company that builds lesson-building software.

The panel discusses WET (Write Everything Twice) vs DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) programming. They talk about when it is beneficial to have abstractions in code and when it is not. It’s also important to think about the humans that are going to be using it, and to write the code so that it’s humane. They praise good error messages that tell you exactly where you went wrong and how to fix it. They talk about the dangers of putting invariants everywhere, and finish by talking about ways to improve.

Links

Linked list
React Fiber
Hooks
Backbone
JavaScript
Redux
Gatsby
Flow
Jake Archibald: In The Loop-JS Conf Asia 2018 (video)
What the heck is the event loop anyway? (video)
Practical 00 Design in  Ruby, Sandi Metz
Stop trying to be so DRY, instead Write Everything Twice (WET)
Sebastian Markbage: Minimal API Surface Area – Learning patterns instead of frameworks
Someone Is Changing Your Code
Conlin Durbin username for most places is ‘wuz’, except Twitter for twitter it’s @CallMeWuz

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Picks

Justin Bennett:

The 3 most effective ways to build trust as a leader article
Pheonix Live View

Lucas Reis:

Pamela Zave
Small Functions Considered Harmful article

Dave Ceddia:

New Redux course
Kinesis Advantage 2 Keyboard

Charles Max Wood:

MicroConf
BuzzSprout

Thomas Aylott:

Noflojs.org
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

Conlin Durbin:

https://dev.to/
Soft Skills Engineering
Conlin’s Discord server