Michael Chan

The Code is rising up to enslave us. An army of linter-plugins have given it a voice and it's angry. Clean code isn't the goal, its the enemy. Great code isn't clean, it's hot garbage—hot-swappable and easy to throw out. Code is a means to an end. When we stop fetishizing code and start fighting it, we've found the right enemy and we can get back to to the good work of serving customers.

2018

React Rally

Hot Garbage: Clean Code is Dead

You have two teams, making two apps. The first made something that demands very few updates and doesn't require specialized knowledge. But the codebase is huge. The second is a bespoke, Hacker News masterpiece. But it demands regular rewrites and requires constant re-education.

Which do you chose?

Maybe you already chose a path. Your fingers are bleeding from all the typing or you're in the middle of re-write #3.

How do you get off that path?

Let's talk about getting back to React, the overlooked APIs and uncommon patterns that make you a happier and healthier React developer.

2017

Back to React: The Story of Two Apps

React allows you to write styles inline and bypass a host of CSS shortcomings. Scope, dependency management, dead code elimination, these problems go away when adding your styles directly to components. But it's not all rainbows and unicorns. Things like theming and media queries become much more difficult when all your styles live directly on components. In this talk, we'll look at how to solve these problems with contexts and plain old JavaScript. We'll also look at the role of container-components and when it's better to "just use CSS."