My last working day before the holidays just ended. It’s a wrap, another twelve months flew by. This will also be the last newsletter for 2020. So, what have we learned this year?
You can never know everything. Whenever I gain confidence as an engineer, I find new areas in which I’m still a novice.
“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.”
Writing code is not building software. The best engineers I’ve met are those who think about the products they’re building - beyond the technical parts.
“A clever person solves a problem, a wise one avoids it.“
Focus on processes not on deadlines. Thinking about the destination doesn’t tell you how to get there. Focus on the daily activities of the team instead.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
The JavaScript ecosystem is incredible. Each time I decide to try out a different language or think about moving away, there’s an exciting technology that sparks my interest.
“Always bet on JavaScript.”
A video worth watching
Building resilient frontend architecture - Monica Lent describes the role of architecture in our fight against constant entropy. In an industry in which a rewrite seems to be the decision to make every few years, we need to build applications that are more resilient to change. I really enjoyed this talk.
A tool worth exploring
React Query - I haven’t been following the React ecosystem that closely this year. The landscape around data fetching has indeed changed. This library provides a great API for data fetching, caching and refetching. It makes common use cases like handling loading and error states easier as well as implementing pagination and load more functionalities.
A quote worth pondering
"Writing software as if we are the only person that ever has to comprehend it is one of the biggest mistakes and false assumptions that can be made." - Karolina Szczur
