Fire-Side Chat with Kent C. Dodds

React Summit Remote Edition

React Summit Remote Edition 2021

Kent C. Dodds

Consume ➡️ Build ➡️ Teach

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Server-side Auth with Remix, Prisma, and the Web Platform

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Panel Discussion: Future of React

The network that stands between our server and the client is what causes the most complexity in our development process. Whether it be the initial UI we generate on the server, the API calls we make as the user navigates around, or the form submissions our user makes, keeping the application responsive and up-to-date is a massive chore. What would it be like if all of that complexity just disappeared? Freaking great, that's what it would be like. And React Server Components and Actions are what's making that possible. In this talk we'll look into how that's happening and how we can take advantage of this amazing developer experience to deliver even better user experiences.

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Even though his bio offers quite a hefty reading, he only applied for one job in his career. The rest came along as he was building his name as a renowned speaker, teacher, and a prolific figure of the open-source community. How did Kent do it? “Commit to creating high-quality content,” he says. What led you to programming?I had a friend when I was a teenager who was really into it, and he tried to teach me. But I just couldn't get it — it didn't make any sense to me. So I never really thought I'd get into programming, but I liked computers a lot, and I ended up going to school for electrical engineering.  Well, that didn't work because I'm not good at math. But right when I started the program, I got a job at a company uploading videos to YouTube and that sort of thing. The work was tedious, so I decided to write a computer program to automate lots of the work I was doing with the knowledge I had about programming. And that was the first spark of things for me to use programming to solve real-world problems.  What is the most impactful thing you ever did to boost your career? Committing to creating high-quality content. That might sound obvious because I'm a full-time educator now, but I would not have gotten my job at PayPal if I hadn't been so active with my blog. In fact, lots of my jobs came out of me being involved in the community around meetups, conferences, or open-source projects.  How do you choose topics for the content you create, be it for your blog or podcast?I don't think too much about the content other people are creating. And I don't often consume it. My ideas come from the things that I'm working on, things that I'm learning myself, or — when I was working with a team of developers — the things that I had to remind people of in code reviews regularly. Anytime that I would have a code review comment that was pretty long to describe my position, that was an excellent opportunity for a blog post. Also, if people ask me about a topic regularly, I'll make a blog post rather than answer that question multiple times. What would be your three tips for engineers to level up their career? The number one thing I tell people is to be a nice person. I know that sounds fluffy or silly, but it cannot be overstated. You will get so much further in your career and just in life in general if you're a nice person. That doesn't mean that you take people being jerks lying down, but how you interact with others is out of kindness. You could be the best engineer in the entire world, but if you're not a nice person, you will not reach your full potential or accomplish your goals, whatever they may be. Second, it's just as important to decide what you are not going to learn as it is to decide what you are going to learn. You could jump into countless things — and there are successful people who are polyglot programmers, but I can't speak to that a whole lot. All I can tell you is that in my experience, focusing on specific things that I want to be truly good at has worked out great for my career. That doesn't mean that I closed myself off to other things. With my <a href="https://kent.dev">website rewrite</a>, I have been doing a lot of dev ops-related work and a lot of back-end stuff that I've typically not been involved in. You want to keep your head up on what's going on outside of what you're doing so that you know what direction to go in when you come across problems you need to solve. However, finding a focus on what you want to be good at has helped me a lot. That way, you feel a little less stressed. And the third one? Learn how to learn effectively. It's a three-step process: you consume, build, and teach. The consumption of newsletters and Twitter and whatever inspires you, but you don't want to spend too much time doing that — implementing it into actually building something matters. This happens naturally if you work at a company, but maybe you're not making the things you want to learn, so you may want to start a side project. The building phase is where you get experience, but you also want to solidify that experience. How? You start teaching. You don't necessarily have to teach it to people, it could be stuffed animals. The goal of the teaching is to retain in your mind what you've learned through the building process. What are you working on right now? The big thing I'm working on right now is a rewrite of my website. It'll be much more than just a developer portfolio — I'll have user accounts, and there'll be fun things that you can do with it. And because it's more than just a website, I'm using <a href="https://remix.run">Remix</a>, a new cool framework in the React ecosystem. I'm also working on updating my material on <a href="https://testingjavascript.com">TestingJavaScript.com</a> and a TypeScript course as well.  So, whatever I'm working on, it ends up resulting in lots of opportunities for content. Do you have some rituals that keep you focused and goal-oriented? I have a notepad where I keep all of my notes of what I'm going to do for the day so that when I'm checking things off, I'm not distracted notifications. I've tried apps for that, and that does not work well for me.  I also am a firm believer in inbox zero. I have my work inbox and my personal inbox, and I keep them both at zero. And I kind of use that as a to-do list.  And if I'm not feeling excited about working for some reason, I will often hop on my Onewheel, which is an electric skateboard that only has one giant wheel in the middle. It's just a total blast, and I'll hop on that with my backpack and a charger, and I'll go to a Starbucks or a park just to declutter my mind. What things in the React universe are you excited about right now?React version 18 is coming out soon. The experimental version is out there, and it's fun to play with. I'm just really thrilled that it's no longer a concurrent mode but concurrent features that you can opt into. Cool things like that will enable React server components in the future.  But the biggest thing I'm excited about is Remix. That's huge. It eliminates a lot of problems that are solved well other tools, but when I'm using Remix, I don't have those problems, so I don't need those clusters. You already said that teaching is an integral part of the learning process, and you stand your word since you're also a full-time educator. What inspired you to enter this field?I have been a teacher for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a church where you talk in front of your peers from a very young age, and my mom was an elementary school teacher, so teaching has just always been a part of me.  I really just enjoy sharing what I'm learning with others. As far as teaching technical topics, I gave my first workshop when I was still a student at Brigham Young University. With my fellow, we taught how to use AngularJS, and I got Firebase to sponsor pizza so they would show up, and that was pretty fun. Then I started teaching on the side at <a href="https://egghead.io/instructors/kentcdodds?af=5236ad">egghead.io</a> right after I'd graduated. That was when I first got a paycheck for teaching. And I realized that teaching could be quite lucrative and support my family and me as a full-time endeavor. So I did it — I quit my job. I'm a very risk-averse person, so I'd done teaching as a side hustle for four years just to verify that I could make this work. When TestingJavaScript was released, and I got that paycheck, I realized that I didn't need my PayPal salary anymore. I could just focus my daytime on teaching and give my evenings back to my family, which was a nice trait. Apart from that, how has teaching impacted your career? Earlier I mentioned that pretty much all of my jobs came because I was perceived as an expert. After the first job, where I was an intern and then converted into full-time, I never applied to another. I worked for four different companies, and they wouldn't have recruited me if they didn't know who I was and what I was doing. My content is how they knew who I was — I just made it easy for them to find me. Teaching made that impact. It made my career.  We talked about React and Remix. Are there any other open-source projects that you'd recommend keeping an eye on or contributing to?I have some myself. React Testing Library is probably the biggest one that people are familiar with. And if React isn't your jam, then other framework versions of the testing library.  React Query is also really popular. If you're using Remix, you don't need it, but if you're not, I strongly advise using React Query cause it's a stellar, fantastic library, and Tanner Linsley, the creator, is a stellar and fantastic person.  What pieces of your work are you most proud of? Probably the biggest thing I've ever done is <a href="https://epicreact.dev/">EpicReact.Dev</a>. It has helped tens of thousands of people get really good at React, improve their careers and make the world a better place with the skills that they develop. My whole mission is to make the world a better place through quality software, and I feel like I've done that best with Epic React.  There are things that I've built at other companies that are still in use, and I'm proud of those cause they've stood the test of time, at least these last few years. But of everything, I think Epic React has made the biggest impact.<a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"></a>

Kent C. Dodds: Consume, build, and teach — and level up your career

Modern web development is fantastic. There are so many great tools available! Modern web development is exhausting. There are so many great tools available! Each of these sentiments is true. What's great is that most of the time, it's hard to make a choice that is wrong. Seriously. The trade-offs of most of the frameworks and tools you could use to build your application fit within the constraints of the vast majority of apps. Despite this, engineers consistently struggle with analysis paralysis.Let's talk about this, and a solution I am working on for it.

Remix is a web framework that gives you the simple mental model of a Multi-Page App (MPA) but the power and capabilities of a Single-Page App (SPA). One of the big challenges of SPAs is network management resulting in a great deal of indirection and buggy code. This is especially noticeable in application state which Remix completely eliminates, but it's also an issue in individual components that communicate with a single-purpose backend endpoint (like a combobox search for example). In this talk, Kent will demonstrate how Remix enables you to build complex UI components that are connected to a backend in the simplest and most powerful way you've ever seen. Leaving you time to chill with your family or whatever else you do for fun.

Building modern web applications is riddled with complexity And that's only if you bother to deal with the problems Tired of wiring up onSubmit to backend APIs and making sure your client-side cache stays up-to-date? Wouldn't it be cool to be able to use the global nature of CSS to your benefit, rather than find tools or conventions to avoid or work around it? And how would you like nested layouts with intelligent and performance optimized data management that just works™? Remix solves some of these problems, and completely eliminates the rest. You don't even have to think about server cache management or global CSS namespace clashes. It's not that Remix has APIs to avoid these problems, they simply don't exist when you're using Remix. Oh, and you don't need that huge complex graphql client when you're using Remix. They've got you covered. Ready to build faster apps faster? At the end of this workshop, you'll know how to:- Create Remix Routes- Style Remix applications- Load data in Remix loaders- Mutate data with forms and actions

In this talk, we'll get a live coded demo of building custom hand-rolled authentication. When you have the right tools (and we do), authentication can be quite simple and secure. This is more (and better) than just: "Install this library and you're good to go." When we're done we'll have our own auth code that can evolve with our ever-changing requirements without a need to learn some library-specific APIs. We'll be leveraging the Web Platform the way it was meant to be done to give us simple and secure server-side authentication for the web. You can check the slides for Kent's talk <a href="https://slides.com/kentcdodds/server-side-auth-with-remix-prisma-and-the-web-platform">here</a> as well as <a href="https://github.com/kentcdodds/node-congress-auth">demo code</a>. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Humans are natural problem solvers and we're good enough at it that we've survived over the centuries and become the dominant species of the planet. Because we're so good at it, we sometimes become problem seekers too–looking for problems we can solve. Those who most successfully accomplish their goals are the problem eliminators. Let's talk about the distinction between solving and eliminating problems with examples from inside and outside the coding world. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Are you the kind of programmer who prefers to never see the same code in two places, or do you make liberal use of copy/paste? Many developers swear the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy while others prefer to Write Everything Twice (WET). But which of these produces more maintainable codebases? I've seen both of these approaches lay waste to codebases and I have a new ideology I would like to propose to you: Avoid Hasty Abstractions (AHA). In this keynote, we'll talk about abstraction and how you can improve a codebase applying and creating abstractions more thoughtfully as well as how to get yourself out of a mess of over or under-abstraction.

Panel Discussion: Testing

How do you level up? How do you jumpstart your learning when getting into something new? Nobody has more than 24 hours a day, so how do you maximize the impact of your limited time? In this keynote, I'm going to tell you a bit of my own story, and some tips and tricks that I've learned so you can be as productive as you can be at learning new things and solidifying that knowledge so it's there when you need it. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>