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The Greatest React Developer I Ever Met

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14 views9 pages

The Greatest React Developer I Ever Met

Uploaded by

ddlyt000124
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Greatest React Developer I Ever Met

What makes a truly great engineer? Over the last 5 years, I have

had the privilege of working with all kinds of people — from young

blood to veterans. But as the saying goes, very few people will

scratch the surface of your mind.

Today, I will share the story of one of the greatest engineers I have

seen in my life. And the weird part is I realized how awesome he

was only after he left the organization.

Let’s begin…

He was not the fastest


Once we were aiming for a monthly release. At the very end of the

sprint cycle, there came a new requirement for creating a little

role-based authorization mechanism in the front-end.

As the code of the back-end was already there, the management

wanted to push this to the next release.

However, he refused to do it and the management was not happy

at all.

I was a junior back then and thought why did he do that? From

the description, I understood that it was possible to do it within 2

days. But still he just straight out refused to do that.

It’s not all about speed.


This type of hasty work has become a norm in start-up culture but

later in my career, I realized why he was right. Maybe 99% of the

time, this practice doesn’t hurt but the rest 1% can damage the

company or even sometimes a person’s whole career!

His code read like a poem


It was much much later that I had the privilege to work on his

project after he left the company (due to conflict with

management).

It’s a shame that I couldn’t understand my own code (if I looked at

it after 3–4 months) but his code was so beautiful that a junior

developer like myself had absolutely no problem understanding

what was going on there.

Here is an example.

export const SomeComponent = () => {


const userInfo = getUserInfo();

const profileDetails = getProfileDetailsOfUser(userInfo.id);

const aboutData = extractAboutData(profileDetails);

const personalData = extractPersonalData(profileDetails)

return (
<UserDetails>
<About data={aboutData} />
<PersonalInfo data={personalData} />
</UserDetails>
)
}

It’s hard to appreciate it inside a 3-minutes read Medium article

but once you start working on a project with hundreds of

components, this piece of code can bring peace inside you.

He cared about best practices


It was from him I understood the importance of following the best

practices. These are hard to understand as a junior dev but as time

marched on, I understood how following best practices

automatically helps to write cleaner code.


He had an extensive Eslint setup. I can still remember there were

like 30–35 rules there. I didn’t even understand many of those

back then.

He had his own way of doing things


One thing that baffled me about his code was his verbosity. He

would name the functions in a particular but consistent fashion.

Let me give a very simple example. We need to sort an object

array very often right? A quick Google search would give

something like this and we would just change the property name.

sortedArray = objs.sort((a,b) => (a.last_nom > b.last_nom) ? 1 : ((b.last_nom > a.last_nom) ? -1


: 0))

But this was not the same for him. He would do something like
this.
function compare( a, b ) {
if ( a.last_nom < b.last_nom ){
return -1;
}
if ( a.last_nom > b.last_nom ){
return 1;
}
return 0;
}

objs.sort( compare );

Both of these do the same thing but for his way, I would not have

to scratch my head and look at the code for 2 minutes just to

understand what’s going on there.

Later in my career, I understood that meaningful names are more

important than reducing 2 lines from your codebase.

In the long run, everything is about maintainability and reducing

technical debt. And he was a master of it.

He was against change


After the hooks were made official, all of the community rushed

towards re-factoring their codebase into functional components.

But he didn’t let us do that.


Yes, obviously that was maybe not a good idea then because now

almost every new codebase is written with functional components

but despite that, he wanted us to wait.

Every new technology/library is like a shiny toy. Everybody loves

to play with that. Now and then, some new library comes along

and we think about how we can use that inside the project.

But he refused to add those almost every time. I have to admit

that I felt a little annoyed at times. Sometimes I even thought that

maybe he refused those because he didn't know how to use those

libraries himself.

But as time marched on, it became clear that he was very aware of

the new changes but was very careful about using those. He

understood that adding anything and everything has its own cost,

especially in the JavaScript world.


He left
After 6–7 months, he switched jobs because of some conflict with

the management.

So the project that he maintained came to me. I started to go

through his codes and later realized how awesome he was. On the

surface, we were doing the same job. Delivering features that were

being asked.

But inside the code, what he did just blew me away. From the

folder structure to naming variables, the care he put into each line

of code made me fall in love with programming. I realized:

A good piece of code is a thing of beauty!

And I still carry this philosophy with me.


Conclusion
We had our differences in opinion while we worked together.

Maybe he wasn’t right all the time, maybe he had some issues with

an expression that made him an unlikeable person.

Nevertheless, he is the greatest React developer (maybe the

greatest developer in general) that I have seen till now.

Do you know somebody like this?

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