Weekly JavaScript Round-Up (April 17, 2020)

Kent C. Dodd’s AHA Programming Talk at React Summit Remote Edition

Often when writing or reviewing code, developers have a natural tendency to create an abstraction that avoids duplication upfront but evolves into a hairy situation as new use cases come. Kent C. Dodds in his recent talk at React Summit summarizes, demystifies, and visualizes this problem as well as a solution.

Are you the kind of programmer who prefers to never see the same code in two places, or do you make liberal use of copy/paste? Many developers swear by the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy while others prefer to Write Everything Twice (WET). But which of these produces more maintainable codebases? I’ve seen both of these approaches lay waste to codebases and I have a new ideology I would like to propose to you: Avoid Hasty Abstractions (AHA). In this keynote, we’ll talk about abstraction and how you can improve a codebase by applying and creating abstractions more thoughtfully as well as how to get yourself out of a mess of over or under-abstraction.