The Interactive Guide to Rendering in React

Do you find React rendering mysterious or confusing? The always funny and information Tyler McGinnis has just the guide for you over at ui.dev!

Here’s a nice bite-sized post on TypeScript generics: A great introduction if you’ve never used them before!

I’m on a roll with programming nerdery, I guess. What is “Declarative” programming?

It’s like trying to answer What came first, the chicken or the egg? except everyone seems to think the chicken did, but you don’t even like eggs, and you’re confused. Combine this frustration with the bastardization of the actual word “declarative” to basically just mean good and all of a sudden your imposter syndrome is tap dancing on your confidence, and you realize you don’t even like programming that much.

If you don’t want to read the entire “You Don’t Know JS” book series (which I highly recommend), it’s good to read occasional articles about nerdy JavaScript language stuff. You don’t need to be a CS geek to benefit from learning more about the language you use as a frontend developer.

A bit of an inflammatory title, and it’s also kind of a promotional post for a product that benefits from a “yes” answer to the question in the headline. And, on the contrary, it’s also a classic example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. From the penultimate paragraph:

NoSQL isn’t dead.

Duh.

Nonetheless, this was an interesting read. I’m not all that often called upon to make decisions about databases, but when I do, and even when a NoSQL DB might be a good fit, I always end up choosing relational databases.

Every now and then it’s worth taking a deep dive into language nerdery. Here’s a great article for anyone who’d like to understand more about the JavaScript prototype system, which is quite a thing if you’ve only seen the ES6-style class syntax.

I run my personal website on Netlify, but most of the production NextJS apps I’ve worked on have been deployed to AWS or Google Cloud. For a startup, there’s a good chance the cost savings of running directly on one of the big platforms outweighs the extra engineering effort required.

HTML First

As a multi-decade-long frontend developer, I have a lot of sympathy with the values of HTML First. This definitely feels aspirational for most web applications of significant complexity, but that might not always be true! Frontend developers should, at the very least, always be thinking about how to leverage the browser and the built-in language features, even if the ideas here aren’t totally realistic for everyone.

But also, I don’t think I can let this go:

The main goal of HTML First is to substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases. This is good from an individual perspective because it allows a greater number of people to become web programmers, to build great web software, and increase their income.

I’m… not so sure this holds up in the post-LLM era. Simply knowing how to write HTML might already be a skill that’s less valuable than knowing how to write a prompt that generates HTML.