Link tags: codebase

Building Dark Mode | Product Blog • Sentry

Robin makes a good point here about using dark mode thinking as a way to uncover any assumptions you might have unwittingly baked into your design:

Given its recent popularity, you might believe dark mode is a fad. But from a design perspective, dark mode is exceptionally useful. That’s because a big part of design is about building relationships between colors. And so implementing dark mode essentially forced everyone on the team to think long, hard, and consistently about our front-end design components. In short, dark mode helped our design system not only look good, but make sense.

So even if you don’t actually implement dark mode, acting as though it’s there will give you a solid base to build in.

I did something similar with the back end of Huffduffer and The Session—from day one, I built them as though the interface would be available in multiple languages. I never implemented multi-language support, but just the awareness of it saved me from baking in any shortcuts or assumptions, and enforced a good model/view/controller separation.

For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what.

Micro Frontends

Chris succinctly describes the multiple-iframes-with-multiple-codebases approach to web development, AKA “micro frontends”:

The idea really is that you might build a React app and I build a Vue app and we’ll slap ‘em together on the same page. I definitely come from an era where we laughed-then-winced when we found sites that used multiple versions of jQuery on the same page, plus one thing that loaded all of MooTools and Prototype thrown on there seemingly by accident. We winced because that was a bucket full of JavaScript, mostly duplicated for no reason, causing bugs and slowing down the page. This doesn’t seem all that much different.

Why Did I Have Difficulty Learning React? - Snook.ca

When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure I was wrapping child elements properly. But overall, I felt like I grasped it well enough.

Throw in everything else at the same time, though, and things get confusing because it’s hard at first to recognize what belongs to what. “Oh, this is Redux. That is React. That other thing is lodash. Got it.”

This resonates a lot with Dave’s post:

React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.

Rebuilding slack.com – Several People Are Coding

A really great case study of a code refactor by Mina, with particular emphasis on the benefits of CSS Grid, fluid typography, and accessibility.