3 Minutes with Kent

Kent C. Dodds

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TECHNOLOGY

👋 Hi there! I'm Kent C. Dodds (https://twitter.com/kentcdodds). This is a (week)daily podcast where I give 3 minute thoughts about web development. You can subscribe on iTunes here: http://kcd.im/3-mins-itunes and on RSS here: http://kcd.im/3-mins-rss

10/06/2021

Prisma is amazing

Hey there friends. So yesterday I was just a fanboying I guess about Prisma. If you haven't heard of Prisma, it is a Oh what does that? It's ORN, I can't remember what what the word for that is but it interfaces between you and a backend database. So it supports post-grass and SQLite my sequel and a MongoDB support is coming. So yeah, just so you have a database and you tell it what database what kind of,Database you're hitting and how to connect to it or what the connection URL is. And then it manages connecting to it and you have the rest of your code doesn't have to worry about what type of database it is. You just work with Prisma. And what makes Prisma especially special is that it has a really great way for defining your schema for the types or the models that your database supports. It has a really nice way of making the database match that so it'll create the tables for you and everything. It has a great way for my great.Hitting so if you need to change the column name or something then it will automate that process and and that can be part of your deployment pipeline is to alter tables to add columns and stuff like that. It doesn't quite help you with like breaking changes. It they have some articles to help, you know, how to go about doing that and I have successfully done that with Prisma. But yeah, and and it's it's not like a terribly difficult thing to do necessarily but I mean if it's a really great big breaking change then having zero downtime is tricky. But yeah, I've had a couple like the situations where I needed to remove an enum value and stuff and I was able to do that without too much trouble. Thanks to a lot to prism as migrate feature, but then the thing that you experience on a regular basis working with Prisma that just I love is its type script support. So you define this schema and then it generates TypeScript types. So that as you're using Prisma you say Prisma dot and then the,The table that you want to get and info from and then find many and then you have a select and aware and an order by and if there's relations so like a user has many posts or something then you can get all that users posts or if you're looking for posts, you can get the the author and data from that and it's all just so nice with TypeScript. It's it's brilliant. So if you are using one of those databases and you haven't tried Prisma yet give it a look it is fantastic. I'm really really happy with it. Hope you're having an awesome day andWe'll talk to you later.

3 min
08/06/2021

Using ScriptKit to easily upload images to @cloudinary

https://github.com/johnlindquist/kit/discussions/310 https://www.scriptkit.com/ Hello friends. So this morning, I finished something that I was working on a little bit yesterday. It's a script kit script to call Cloud Nary upload which allows me to very easily upload images to my cloud nary account. It uses the cloud nary API and yeah, I just need a couple of environment variables and and you can use this too. You get script kit, you can copy the same script. And yeah, you just need a couple environment variables and then it uses the script kit. UI which is basically kind of like,Spotlight or Alfred where you say I want to run the culinary upload and then it asks you which folder you want to upload it to and it gives you this way to navigate around those so you can say on the current folder. I want one folder one directory yep or I want to go into this directory and so you can kind of navigate the folder structure of cloud nary which is really useful for me because I know that I could just like throw all of my blog post images and all of my epic react article images and all of my other images throughout my site into one giant bucket andReference those URLs and whatever but I don't know about you I just really like to have things organized and directory makes the most sense. And so, you can navigate around the directory as you would expect. You can create a new directory and I also cash the other folders that are within a directory so I don't have to hit the API every time you go you're as your navigating around. And so I give you an option to refresh the cash for a particular directory. And and yeah, and so once you've selected your directory, then it gives you a drag and drop little UI where you can drop as many images.As you like and then it goes through each one of those images and asks you what you want the name of the image to be it gives the default for whatever the file name is And then yeah and then it'll upload it. And when you're all done, it will open up your browser to show you to the directory that you chose so that you can see all the images. It also copies the URL for each image that you uploaded and so if you have if you're just uploading one then that's the one that's in your code board. If you upload multiples and they're gonna overwrite each other, which is why I think it's really good idea to have a clipboard history with Alfred is is how I do that. And so yeah, I just updated.My 2010 decade and review posts in their like 20 images in that post and I uploaded those all of those and updated the blog post in like just five minutes. It was really nice. So eventually, I'm gonna automate the whole process of putting all of my images on cautionary for all my blog posts, but this was a really good first take it what it's gonna be like for writing new blog posts and uploading new images. So anyway, this is another example of where script kit is awesome. I'll put a link to the script in the description and I hope that's interesting and helpful. Have a nice day.

3 min
07/06/2021

Avoid Hasty Abstractions: Hooks edition

Hello friends, so I wanted to talk today about whether or not you should make a custom hook for everything. So a few days ago, maybe last week there was this thing going around where people were recommending that you never ever use the react built-in hooks inside of a component, you always extract it to a custom hook. This is terrible advice. Don't do that at all. So the way that I think about hooks in React is the they're basically functions that have the,Only special distinction of being functions that actually call other hooks. That's the only thing special about them. So everything else about this function is the same as regular functions. And you don't make a function for every line of code that you write right? Like that would be ridiculous. The reason that we make functions is to encapsulate certain logic. And most of the time it's useful mostly for reuse. Sometimes it could be nice to take a bunch of chunks of code. And logically put it together so that it can be separate from the rest of our our code, but you've got to keep in mind that every single time you abstract something into another function you're adding complexity. And now you have to pass parameters and and maybe you didn't pass enough and so now you need to update those in the except the additional parameters and and and then if you're doing TypeScript, you have to make sure that you're typing for those parameters is correct and and potentially worry about the return value and then oh what if now weDecide that there's some logic in this function that says never mind let's return early or let's throw an error or something like that. Now, you have to start worrying about the consumer and say, oh well, they wanted to return early from here. So, I'll return early. It just gets to be more complex. There are more things to think about. So you can't avoid adding complexity when you start abstracting things into functions. It's just the way that it is it always adds complexity. Now whether or not it makes your code simple or more simple.Is a different matter or sorry let me say that differently whether or not it makes it easier for you as the the writer of the coder and the maintainer of the code to understand what's going on. That's a different matter. But the fact is that it will always increase complexity to extract things into separate functions and that is no different with hooks. This is especially relevant if you wanted to abstract just the use effect part, but you want to pass in some sort of function that's going to get called within that effect. That means that you'll either need to.Call back that your passing in or you have to use the latest ref pattern to always use the latest function. So anyway, hope that helps.

3 min
04/06/2021

performance.mark and performance.measure for improved DevTools profiling

https://stackoverflow.com/a/46780568/971592 Hello there friends. Sorry, it's been a little bit of a break but I was working on something and I wanted to measure how fast it was but yeah and so I'm gonna use the Chrome DevTools profiling performance tab to profile it. And it's always so frustrating to like try and find the part of the code that you're trying to profile in that flame graph. It's really kind of a confusing area. And I remembered that there's the performance mark API and so you have the ability to add your own custom timings and so,You can say okay here's the start of what I'm trying to measure and here's the end. And how long did all of that take? And you can do like performance down now console log in and then like compare and stuff. But I wanted to look at the flame graph. And so I it didn't work right away and I looked up and found a stack overflow post that showed exactly how to do this and so I'll link to that in the notes of this episode. But basically, it's a combination of the mark and measure APIs on the performance object. So you say performance dot mark and you give it a string to label that mark.And then another performance you do whatever it is you want to do So in my case I wanted to measure the reading time of a blog post and I'm using this module called reading hyphen time, which I think is what like all the gaps people logs and everything used for this. And so I call that function and I'm on a really big blog post and to test this out. I call that function and then on the next line you say performance.mark and you give it another label and then you say right after that performance dot measure and you give three arguments the first is the label for. The measurement the second is for the start marker So whatever you put for the first performance dot mark, that's what the second argument here. And then the last argument is whatever you put for the end. So you give it a name and then the start in the end and then that will show up in your dev tools in the performance profiling tab and it just makes it so much easier to make sure that you're honing in on the area of the code that you actually care about. Unfortunately, I don't know whether this works very well for asynchronous code. So, I cure it's we're gonna do an await here and then afterThat away I don't think that's gonna work very well But for synchronous code it works great And actually if we're talking about async code and there is some performance profiling metrics that you can do with React app specifically and they do have the ability to do some sort of timings for that with asynchrony. It's actually very cool and I teach you about it on epic react. So if you're if you're not done the performance workshop yet, or the actually the performance section of the bookshelf app, then you may not have run up against that. But it's really cool. All right, hopefully that's helpful. I'll chat with you later.

3 min
02/06/2021

Make your DB schema as restrictive as possible for easier migrations

Hello there friends. Welcome to June I am thinking about Postgres and Prisma and that sort of thing a lot lately because I'm working on my website and doing that sort of thing and one tip that I have for you if you ever do database sort of things is try to make sorry to make your data as. As restrictive as possible. Early on as as you're trying to make things. So like make things if you're like, I don't know if there should be a required field or not make it required. If you're this is an enum but we could have this we could have a lot of different values for this potentially have the fewest number of values possible to get you to the next phase. The reason is because it's a lot easier to later do a migration.That expands the permissive venous of that schema than going the other direction because when you go the other direction, you have to find all of the data rows that don't go into the new schema and update those so that they they fit. So, for example, if you have a first name field and you decide to make it optional first and then after you have a bunch of users you come in later and you decide no no this first name field needs to.Be required. Well, now you have to first go and update all of the usernames to be like unknown or something before you can do that schema update. And so yeah, just try to when you're starting a new project or when you're yeah, I guess not even a new project but when you're adding a new model or something like that try to be as restrictive as possible early and then you can loosen things up later when you have more context and you know, what makes more sense. So yeah, hopefully that's helpful and interesting. IIt's this is just personally affected me because I I was really loose at the start of this project and then I had to tighten things up and it's kind of annoying. So anyway, I hope that's interesting helpful. Ah, but a nice day.

2 min
29/05/2021

Fixating on fixing rerenders

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/fix-the-slow-render-before-you-fix-the-re-render https://kentcdodds.com/blog/colocation https://epicreact.dev/improve-the-performance-of-your-react-forms Hello there friends. So today somebody shared a lightbri with me and I assumed that it was just a library to help you track rerenders. But it turns out it's like a state management library and that helps you avoid rerenders but my initial reaction and thought about tracking re-renders is the tools like that. I think lead people to jump directly to the natural and obvious solution, which is often not the best solution and I'm talking about memoization. So when,If you're tracking rerenders and that's how you measure whether something's faster or not you're gonna say, oh well this component didn't need to rerender so therefore. I will apply the re-render hammer to solve this problem and that is react memo. And then you have to use memo or use callback all the things that you pass to it. And that spiders in into the rest of your code base really easily. And so what I recommend is I have a blog post called fix the slow render before you fix the rerender and so you have to put a little bit more thought into it, but you find out what part of you. Here rendering is slow because even if you fix the rerender at some point you've got to render like there are necessary renders. And if those are slow then that's not a great user experience either. And so if you can fix that then maybe you'll be able to avoid needing to worry about rerenders. But sometimes you just there's nothing that's slow in particular. It's just a lot of things that add up to make the experience slower and so fixing renders is kind of the the best approach for that. And when you're in that situation, then I actually wrote.Another blog post called state look colocation can make your react apps faster and just recently wrote a blog post that takes an angle on the like forms and how you can use state collocation with forms and I'll link all of those at the top of this the description this episode. But basically, I think that we can get a lot by using state co-location also composability and composing our components, especially like layout components, so you don't have to pass.Props through all these other you know app components And as with a combination of the way that you structure things you often don't have to worry about unnecessary renders because they just can't happen. So anyway, the library itself was a state management tool and and some people get a kick out of that and that's great. That's awesome. I haven't found myself needing to reach for many state management tools outside of react query and went with Remix. I don't really need a state management tool. It's pretty awesome. But yeah, those are just some of the thoughts that I had when I first saw the name of this librarian. So hope that,Is interesting and helpful have a nice day.

3 min
28/05/2021

Keep related utilities in a single file

Hello there friends, so I was thinking this morning about utilities and you know these little utility functions that we write and we put it in like a utils modular or something and sometimes when we're running these we want to split things out to make it just.Easier to manage or something and and it's just kind of a natural thing at least for me to want to split things out into individual files, so each utility is in its own file, you know, if it's just a single line or something. I typically just keep it on one but if it's kind of complicated or maybe there are group of utilities that make a lot of sense together. I just feel naturally inclined to move those into a separate file. But what I've found is in my experience is that you're often better off just leaving utilities all in the same file and thenMaybe using code comments or something to separate different parts of that file because what what I found happens over and over again is one utility depends on another and that utility depends on this other utility which depends on the first one and so you have like a cyclic dependency or cyclical dependency sort of thing and so when you try to start pulling things out into different utility or into different files, now you have to extract the other files. Or other utilities into separate files as well ultimately leading to basically a lot of files that have just a couple lines of utilities. And I definitely don't see that as being any simpler. And in fact, it can be even more complex when you start adding type script and now you have types that you need to extract it to different files so you can use them together. So, but there is a reason that we like to keep our files shorter and that's because when when you have a really big utility that can be really complicated. I,Worked on a a backbone view that was like 3,000 lines long once and it was not fun and I did not like having such a big file, but I've been thinking about this and I think that the problem isn't necessarily the size of the file the problem is the size of the the individual component. And so and just the number of concerns it was mixing. That was what made it really difficult. And so yeah, the the length of the file that doesn't really matter all that much. It's the number of mixed concerns that makes things really difficult. So, I would encourage you to. Think twice before extracting utility files or your utility functions into individual files and maybe first try to organize that file a little bit to make it easier to manage. I hope that's helpful and interesting have a nice day.

3 min
27/05/2021

if statements and "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"

Good morning or afternoon or evening friends, I wanted to talk today about a saying that my wife has I think when my kids grow up they're gonna remember my mom always used to say this and and so what she says is we'll cross that bridge when we come to it now, of course this isn't like an original saying but she just says it a lot and what she's saying is that she doesn't want to make these decisions right now or use up the mental energy to decide whether or not. She wants to let the kids do a certain thing or whatever and I've taken to saying it myself, um and what I'll often say is if you want me to answer now, I'll just say no so why don't you wait until I'm able to think about this but it was I was thinking about this in the context of programming and that's kind of what doing calculations within an if statement or the right side of a ternary operator something that's kind of what that's like, so sometimes I will have a block. Of code where I'm doing some calculations and then I have an if statement that says if such and such then use the value of those calculations otherwise do nothing or otherwise do something else and so if you do your calculations first, then you're kind of crossing the bridge before you came to it you're making a calculation for a value for which you may not actually need at all if you don't end up going into the consequent and actually using that value and and so I get instead you put the calculation within the if block or what we call the consequent then. Then you're crossing the bridge when you come to it you don't actually need to make that calculation until you actually need to get that value now there are I explain this to my wife last night and I thought oh that would be a good thing for three minutes with Kenton and she said well now what are the situations in which you would ever want to do the calculation before, you know, you actually need it and I said well, sometimes it can be useful just for the way the code is structured you do all the calculations up here, sometimes it's easy to calculate one thing while you're calculating another thing even ifYou may not need both of those things and so there are reasons where you might want to cross the bridge before you come to it, but I I think in those situations you want to make sure that you're not ending up with a performance problem of some kind so mentoring can help out a lot so at the end of the day it comes down to readability and what's the most readable and then the exception is for those times where it's a performance problem then then you do things anyway just thought it was kind of interesting analogy or metaphor. Hope you're having a nice day, we'll talk to you later.

3 min

See All (235)

Creator

Kent C. Dodds
Years Active

2016 - 2021
Episodes

235
Rating

Clean
Show Website

3 Minutes with Kent

3 Minutes with Kent

Prisma is amazing

Using ScriptKit to easily upload images to @cloudinary

Avoid Hasty Abstractions: Hooks edition

performance.mark and performance.measure for improved DevTools profiling

Make your DB schema as restrictive as possible for easier migrations

Fixating on fixing rerenders

Keep related utilities in a single file

if statements and "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"

About

Information

3 Minutes with Kent

Episodes

Prisma is amazing

Using ScriptKit to easily upload images to @cloudinary

Avoid Hasty Abstractions: Hooks edition

performance.mark and performance.measure for improved DevTools profiling

Make your DB schema as restrictive as possible for easier migrations

Fixating on fixing rerenders

Keep related utilities in a single file

if statements and "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"

About

Information