Life's a mess. So is this blog! 😅

When the last edition of the wonderful React newsletter landed in my mailbox, one of the links caught my eye: “Why I stopped using Redux”. Pleasantly, the link sent me to Dev.to, a social network of sorts for developers that you must absolutely be a part of. Now, grumpy devs writing against Redux is nothing new. While for many Redux is the perfect solution for the messy, ugly problem of state management, for others it’s an overcomplicated, over-engineered, half-complete solution that is being rammed down their throats by the snobs of the React world.

In an earlier post I wrote, I remarked on how many developers in the React community feel that Redux is an overkill, an antipattern, and so on. And so, they’ve started developing in the Context API instead. In fact, the narrative now is that Context is going to “kill” Redux. Is it? Well, the thing is, Context is really simple and works well with the new Hooks API, but lurking in the beauty is a major concern: performance.

Even at 5+ years of fullstack development, I find CSS to be my Achilles’ heel. Recently, I ran into the need to alter how basic input elements like <input>, <select>, etc., look, and while it was simple to make others obey, the <select> was one tricky customer. No matter how much I tried, it completely ignored any changes in rounded corners: the corners were always rounded equally, and that too by the default radius.

StackOverflow (SO) needs no introduction among the developer community. No matter what type of problem you’re stuck with — whether you’re unable to figure out a merging algorithm or whether you’re staring at a dense error log by your web server — just throw those words into the search engine and nine times out of ten, StackOverflow will have an existing, clear-cut answer for that. It’s arguably the largest destination for developers, and no matter what level and skillset you’re talking of, you’re likely to find more than enough suitable devs there.

Some things in life and good and noble but require courage. Still, they are worth doing and we should do them irrespective of the price. Inviting the creator of the Clojure programming language to speak at the RailsConf isn’t one of them! Allow me to explain. The talk was one of the best I’ve heard ever. It might even go down in history as the most software architecture talk in the Rails history.