Over the past few years, we have heard a variety of strategies succeed in the dispute for how best to approach software development. A few years ago, it was common to use the term API-first. More recently, the enthusiasm was with AI-first. As a developer, I suggest adopting a new strategy.
Mankind constantly analyzes radio waves from outer space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since this analysis started, almost all of the signal sources have been identified. 37 signals, however, remain unexplained.
This is one of the most famous books in the programming universe. Its fame seems only not to be bigger than the number of developers that still has not read it. Some of them complain about the examples shown in the book to be written in Java, wrongly considering the language as an obstacle to understand what clean code is. I have also heard that clean code would be a utopia, that functions containing four or five statements would be reserved for the software development Olympus.
It was mid-2018, and I needed to build an application for internal use at the company I was working for. The project consisted of building a panel to monitor the main application releases of the company. I was the only front-end developer in the project. I had all the powers to structure it the way I considered best. So I didn't miss the opportunity to drive it to quality.
Think you are a programmer, a front-end programmer. You collaborate with the development of a web product. Your workmates are back-end programmers, designers, and product owners. So, on an ordinary day, in a casual meeting, in a simple presentation or in a regular chat among team members, you make use of a word, a much simple word: Component.
This is a complement to a previous post about bundling environment variables using Gulp. Keeping with the same expectation of maintaining a simple, easy to understand and crystal clear way to manage environment variables in the browser without having to make any trick or write unnecessary code, I show below how to achieve that same result using now Webpack.
We are living times where the Model/View/Controller concept is getting more and more obsolete making Component-Based approach the new standard to develop web applications now. However, as well as Component-based has become a so popular concept, I still see a lot of developers understanding components in a surprisingly weird way.
Front end projects usually make use of external resources through URLs, API Keys, etc. Those things may change depending on which environment you are running your code. If you are in a development environment, you don't want to mess your metrics like Mixpanel or Google Analytics, for example.
Every developer knows the importance of keeping the code as much decoupled as possible. Loosely coupling drives your code to smaller responsibilities and, consequently, granular objects which bring us fast understanding and easy maintenance. Sometimes, one of the strategies which can aid you to achieve this is to use events to make those granular objects communicate each other without necessarily know each other.