Nov 2019

November is ending!!!

I haven't been very prolific in terms of writing this month. I feel this is an absolute negative phase for me after JSConf China and I don't really feel like writing or speaking.

I did put in a lot of thoughts into coding, though, partially thanks to reporting to a lead with high standards. I still cannot evaluate my code, but at least I'm now comfortable to bring it for discussions:

• Avoid Flash of Loading Component
• Turn Callback into Promise and Await

I've also posted my parsing of Dan's discussion "point me to a book" that accidentally caught some attention and here's the notes:

• Dan's Thread on Interesting Books

Then for the remaining of this month I've been reading two books from the list above, Code and Game Programming Patterns.

Code is a book about how computer works. But what's really really special about this book is that it explains all the things from complete scratch. How scratch? Think flash lights as signals, to Braille and Morse code, to the base 2 number system. Then to light bulbs, to wiring electronic boards, to logic gates with boolean algebra, ...and lots of interesting content omitted to not spoil you. Bonus: it explained where the verb "code" came from.

Game Programming Patterns is incredibly patient and intuitive. I'm still working in progress on building my joycon, which essentially is a gamepad, and so I have a lot to learn.

Oct 2019

This month, I've mainly been learning about React. I have many small notes around problems I encounter as I work on one major project for work:

• Properly Include Component Function from useEffect and useCallback Dependency List
  My understanding and learning in action of Dan Abramov's article A Complete Guide to useEffect
• Re-export Context Provider
  Some handy things I found by wrapping XXContext.Provider by a custom component
• Outerspace Operation
  Home cooking state management with connector to a React app

I've also figured out how to Enable concurrent mode with Gatsby site. Turns out, there are complexities I never thought about around static sites' hydration process. How useful will concurrent mode be in Gatsby sites? That is still under exploration...

On the side, I'm also working on the slides feature of my other site:

• Is It an Article or a Deck of Slides?
  This is an umbrella post for multiple smaller explorations including fullscreen API. A relatively bigger exploration but still under work in progress is Joy-Con Clicker, which I'll likely be talking about in React Knowledgeable #5.

I also spoke at JSConf China this month. My topic was about things I learn as I write docs, which gave me another push to publishing my retrospective post 4 Years as Front End. Hoping to inspire some minds who were lost like I was a year ago.