New things in JavaScript are popping up all the time. From frameworks to features, it never stands still. Keeping up is often a tricky and time-consuming process, but if we don’t keep up we risk not making the best product we can.
The best pieces of code are the ones that aren’t written. Making generic, reusable classes has been the key to good development for the longest time. The same goes for React and its component system. Make a generic <Button/> and build from there.
Web applications today are fast-moving, multi-user experiences. Things change all the time by people using the same resources. What happens if someone makes a change to a file someone else is also editing? The updates would need to be pushed out to everyone else involved.
CSS in large projects - particularly applications with frameworks like React - can be difficult to scale. Stylesheets tend to inflate over time when developers become too scared to delete old styles just in case they get used somewhere else. Even if they do, in component-based designs, there’s every chance the styles and the code behind it become separated and lost when copying across projects.
Making things for the web is endlessly complicated nowadays. There’s so much to choose - the framework, the tooling, the asset management. Try as we might, testing ends up further down the list than it should. In the latest Net magazine I run down ten different ways to use testing to make a better product.