Issue #5 – Shiny Objects – Visualising React Renders

Issue #5 – Shiny Objects – Visualising React Renders

‍

<1/> Overcoming Shiny Object Syndrome for developers

As engineers, it’s nothing new that we’re required to juggle a variety of constantly emerging technologies. Whether you’re are just starting or you’ve just received the technical requirements for a project, this is something all of us have or will go through in software development.

Shiny object syndrome is a term used when someone focuses all their attention on what is current and trendy rather than focusing on what is currently being done. Developers are creatives which is why it’s not surprising that it happens a lot in teams.

• Project Completion. There is a reason why 90% if not 99% of side projects go to waste,
• Morale. It can be overwhelming when you have nothing to show for your work
• Weaker software. Chasing the new can quickly pull you away from the original goals for the project.

But not all is lost, and you quickly turn this around to make yourself a better developer.

• Long term goals. What is the type of engineer you trying to become? Once you know this, you can make decisions that only directly contribute to that vision.
• Stick to the basics. By learning the general concepts and practices (like documentation, design patterns, etc.) that are common across most technologies, you become a better developer who isn’t tied to learning one thing at a time and can pick up new things quickly as they go.
• Read more. Before diving into a new technology, make sure you are somewhat informed as new technologies come and go.

At the end of the development is a creative process, and it becomes your job to experiment with things to keep up. However, it is important to solidify your focus for the big ideas to materialize.

<2/> A visual guide to react rendering

Hooks have amplified what is possible on your react application, whether it is introducing complex states or smart patterns. They have made the transition from a class to functional components easier for front-end developers using React.

The memo hook provided by React that allows you to optimize UI performance is what we look at. Still, this article allows you to understand the problem that React.memo is meant to solve: Re-renders and what really happens when the state is updated by a child.

There are issues that come with memoizing every component in your application that the article already references, and it points to another post you can read to avoid this technique. It’s short and very visual, which makes it really educational, so give it a read.

<3/> Inside the console

Organisations collect a lot of information and data across different channels and services. This makes it difficult when it comes to collecting that data to use for data analytics.

This is why we use ETL services to look at all your data silos, EXTRACT the data from them, TRANSFORM it into singular clean data and LOAD it into one destination.

Glue is an AWS service that does exactly that (ETL). Although what makes it different are the following 3:

• Serverless. You can forget about having to provision and manage your servers’ lifecycle; you can hit run.
• Auto-discovery. Glue provides crawlers that will automatically discover your data sets and file types, extract the schema, and store it in a config file (metadata log) used in later querying and analysis.
• Script Generation. Glue automatically generates the scripts you need to move data from the source to the target.

<4/> Geeking it up

5 commonly used idioms in the tech industry.

In the spirit of the main topic, here are a few terms you can use to confuse people further.

Build fast, fast with Imba.io

Check out this new web language, built and used by the homies at Scrimba. What is the selling points? Time-saving syntax and the Memoimized DOM that brings faster builds.

Apollo

The team has announced their series D to work on its open-source software, enterprise offering and expand its team.

Git 2.33

Git version 2.33 is now available with new features that introduce new strategies and bug fixes that make actions like maintenance a lot easier. Github Codespaces is now available to teams.

‍