Here is an essay I liked a lot:
I’m going to be honest: I’ve had a hell of a time getting my head around React. More than any other technology I’ve touched over the last 10 years of my career, I just haven’t had it click for me. It’s very frustrating as I really want to learn it, and it’s clear the library has legs.
Honestly, I like the idea of the essay more than I like the essay itself. Which is not to say that the writing isn’t crisp and honest — it is! — but I want the genre to proliferate, to spread like wildfire. I want to wake up to a smattering of “Why it took so long for GraphQL to click” and “What I got wrong about Swift for three years.” So much technical writing is focused on the mountaintop view, rather than the steep uphill climb and the missteps along the way.
I spent a long time (well, like six months, which in the Grand Technology Timeline is like four years) thinking that React was just bad. I think my boneheaded take was encapsulated in this tweet:
It is very terrifying to have your knowledge, your assumptions about what is good and what is right to be invalidated and evolved past! This is true of all things, but I think technology is a landscape where we are prone to no small doses of co-mingling our skillset with our identity. Things move so quickly, and the surface area of what we know is so small, that you are tempted to take a lot of ownership in what you know, to wear your tech stack like armor.
And the rumble of sands shifting underfoot can conjure the broader reality: that the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing in 2018 might be completely obviated in 2028.
Anyway. React is good. So many things that I dismissed out of hand for not quite aligning with my set of priors — behavior-driven testing, monorepos, standups, Negronis, Gantt charts, VS Code, poké bowls, e-bikes, Electron apps, La Croix, standing desks, Javascript type systems — are in fact quite good, or at the very least rational.
If I was being really intellectually honest, though, I’d take a look at some of the things that I currently reject with almost a visceral disgust — cryptocurrencies, kombucha, crossfit, Node, bespoke machine learning — and try to extrapolate which ones I’ll be proven wrong about, as if to pre-empt the process.
(But that’s a different newsletter.)
Some other things
- I attended my first poetry class for the first time since undergrad. It was amazing. (If you are in Seattle: take a Hugo House class. If you are anywhere else: find something that you love and figure out a way to force yourself into a classroom about it. I have been clamoring for the past five years that I need to write more, and it turns out three hours a week of structure and direction is very helpful!)
- There was a kerfuffle about someone tweeting that they don’t want to hire folks who don’t stick around at jobs for at least twelve to eighteen months. Smarter people than me have pointed out all of the reasons that this is a bad idea. I will add only this: it is so obvious and odious that all resume characteristics are Rorschachs, that what you will ascribe to disloyalty or flightiness to one candidate you’ll ascribe to drive and bravery in another.
- You owe it to yourself to spend ten minutes playing around with Segmented Type.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you spend some time on a rooftop deck.