What I’m thinking about this week

Good tools solve real problems. Useful libraries are made because a technology lacks capabilities or they’re hard to work with. Back in the day this was Lodash and jQuery. Now it’s Redux.

Lodash provided many easy to use utilities that JavaScript didn’t have at the time or they were hard to implement.

jQuery solved the problem of bad browser APIs. Working with the DOM was a hassle that it made much easier.

Those were the first tools that you installed when you started a web project some years ago. Now we don’t use them much because the language and the browser adopted their functionality.

I see the same thing happening with Redux - another great library. It solved the problem of complex state management because React had no built in solution. Now, with the Context API and useReducer, I find myself reaching for Redux less and less. 

You know that a tool is good if it’s a force of change for the technology it supports.
 

A quote I'm pondering