Young Reacts #247

It is said that being good at a subject and being good at teaching that subject are two very different skills. I am experiencing this firsthand. When I try to teach a programming concept to a beginner, I find myself struggling to find the right words and getting frustrated. What makes great teachers great?

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Software Engineering ⚙️

React-Google-Apps-Script

I wondered if it’s possible to build app extensions with frameworks like React, and this project showcases precisely that. I could even use Hot Reload with the addon loaded inside Google Docs. Kudos to the author who wrote clear and comprehensive documentation for the project. According to this article, we can use React within a Google Chrome extension, too.

UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You’re Doing User-Centered Design?

This article made me reexamine how we work: are we talking to the real users as we build the product? We haven’t been. Have I been aware of it? Disheartening no. Sadly, I’ve gotten used to how we work based on top-down directives. The silver lining is that we instrument product metrics dashboards to check our assumptions.

Implementation-First GraphQL

I’ve learned quite a lot from Jordan Eldridge in GraphQL Working Group discussions (here is one recent example on GraphQL nullability), so I wanted to read his other work. Implementation-First GraphQL is a GraphQL server implemented using a typed language that generates GraphQL schema based on the return types of the implemented resolvers.

People ❤️

Private Chat and DMs Are Good, Actually

I’ve always believed that heavy usage of private channels and DMs shows mistrust in an organization. But this article made me reevaluate my stance. It also reminded me of a company that banned private channels and DMs, resulting in employees opting for personal messaging apps.

Business 💰

Unity announces its revamped pricing model

Unity addresses many concerns from the developers with an updated pricing model, but the broken trust will haunt them for a long time.

Terraform fork gets renamed OpenTofu, and joins Linux Foundation

Here is another case of broken trust: Terraform moved away from open source, which led to a community-maintained fork. The changed license makes it more costly for other companies to compete in the same market and makes the project slower to improve, potentially hurting the total addressable market. I am curious how it will play out in the long run.