Andrew Yang really seems to be speaking to the problems that I feel like the country is facing and the solutions he's presenting seem to me like they would actually work. He always backs his claims with data and studies. I also really like his attitude against the general vindictive and animosity we feel in the country across party lines. He seems like he genuinely wants to solve the problems and the solutions he presents make sense.

Also, I honestly feel like he's the only candidate that can beat Trump. Nobody else is pulling support from republicans and independents like we'll need to defeat Trump. If someone else gets the nomination, then I'll be very concerned about the general election. If Yang gets it, I'll feel very confident that he can win the whole thing.

Oh, and he's the one who's really thinking about the impact of technology on our future. I don't think anyone else really understands what's coming like he does. The fact that he's thinking about that and has a plan to address it is comforting to me. I don't think he has everything 100% right, but I think he's most prepared to monitor the right signals and make the right adjustments during his 8 years in the white house.

Hi Vivek,

Exactly. I've tried using jscodeshift several times and always got lost. The babel API (the visitor pattern) is just so much simpler for me to work with, so that's what I go with :)

Hi Daniel!

I'm laser focused on React. I keep my eye on other tools and libraries, but there's only so much time in a day so I'm focused on learning and teaching React and JavaScript in general right now. Thanks for the confidence though :)

Hi Raghunandan,

Wrapping abstractions is often a good idea because it allows you to swap abstractions for free*. That said, if you try to change to a new abstraction that completely changes the programming model or API, or the hoops you have to jump through to maintain consistency in the API in a way that results in performance problems or something then is it really worth the effort? The wrapping doesn't come for free after all, so you have to know that it's worth the cost.

With something like React, the requirements of that abstraction will be all over your codebase. If you try to wrap that and then later swap the underlying implementation to Angular for example, that will be functionally impossible.

So if you're asking about wrapping React and having people use your own APIs instead of Reacts, then I'd question the value there.

If you're just talking about making a framework on top of React to allow people to build apps at your company faster, then that's a different thing entirely. Something like Next.js or Gatsby fall into this category. They don't hide React, they just add some opinions. I did this at PayPal, and I recommend it. If you have more than four or five unique applications that you're building at your company, then building a toolkit or framework can save you a lot of time. Though a toolkit as I mention in those posts isn't quite the same as a Next.js or Gatsby. You should be able to build a toolkit on top of those and you'll benefit from those larger communities.

I hope that helps. Good luck!

If it's a small app and the cost of E2E is not significant then yeah, you're probably fine with just E2E 👍

Note that E2E is the only level where I feel comfortable saying that. I don't think you could really consider yourself "safe" with any other level of the testing trophy alone.

Thank you Kent C. Dodds That is particularly the reason why I did not wanted to invest time into writing unit tests for my components as the overall functionality is already covered by the e2e tests. It makes me feel more confident about the overall functionality of my app. I only feel the need of unit tests for certain utility functions and helper functions may be.

I don't think it should be at the same level as reading, writing, and math, but I do think that everyone should be exposed to it, and at an early age. The thing about coding is that when you're just getting started with it, you learn and apply skills that everyone should definitely have even if they don't end up being coders. So the same path you take to start learning (especially for kids) will teach you skills you'll need anyway. And in the process you might find that you really like coding in general and decide to pursue an enjoyable and lucrative career.

Haha, I don't know... Hmmm... I guess that I have 11 brothers and sisters 🤷‍♂️

Hi Blaine,

It's been a little over a year since I used a monorepo (via yarn and lerna) for a component library at PayPal. It was a little complicated, but it worked well. If I were to do it again, I probably wouldn't have bothered. Most people using the PayPal component library internally would need several of the packages so they all probably would've just installed the one package that installed everything anyway, so there's no benefit to splitting them up for that reason. One drawback to this is that a breaking change in any of those components results in a major version bump of the collective package which is annoying, but since almost everyone would be using the one collective package, it doesn't really bring any benefit to splitting them up and really just makes things more complex.

I definitely wouldn't build something like that as concise repos. That would be really hard to manage after just a dozen components or so.

So putting them all in a single repo in a way that's well structured and organized in individual folders for each exported "module" would be the way I would go if I did that again today.

Kent C. Dodds Thank you for your insight and professional experience on the topic.

I have a uses page on my website: kentcdodds.com/uses. That lists a bunch of tools that I would be sad without :)

Hi Kevin!

I like to think that being a good husband and father are among my highest priorities in life. The reason I do what I do is so I can provide for my family and also buy more time to spend with them. The fact that I'm working for myself and working from home allows me to spend more time with my family. As soon as my kids get home from school, they come down to my office to read me a book. I have lunch with my kids every day. I'm available for my wife when she needs me.

I don't know if that's the kind of answer you were looking for, but I think it's important. Some people seem to use success in their career to reinvest in their career further to achieve more career success. At some point the career seems to exist as an end in itself, and not just a means to have more of what you want out of life.

For me, my career success enables me to spend more time working on the relationships that matter most to me. So in that way, being a developer, educator, and entrepreneur has enabled me to spend time practicing being a better father and husband.

Hi Mohd,

I haven't really thought this through in a way to teach it to an absolute beginner. I think there are a lot of concepts I would need to teach an absolute beginner before we got to classes and inheritance. But the way I think about it is that if you want this thing to have the behavior of the parent, then you need to give the parent all the information it needs to do its job, which is why you call super.

I don't think I've explained that very well. I think I'd need to write a blog post or make a video to explain it adequately. Eventually I do plan to target more content toward beginner programmers. :)

Hi Alan!

That's great! I look forward to meeting you at the workshop :)

This is a great question. Your intuition is correct that there are many components that are useless to test (especially when they're being covered by higher-level tests). This blog post may help: How to know what to test. Good luck!

Hi Farhana,

I think this is a really personal question. I know that I would personally choose offer 2, but that's because I enjoy the challenge and interesting projects more. Something that might help you a lot is this conversation I had with Cassidy Williams on my podcast: Establishing Your Personal Brand - with Cassidy Williams

Good luck!

Thanks Kent. I will listen to the podcast very soon. :)

Hi Adnan,

The most important thing that my wife and I needed before going solo was to know that we had a safety net in case things didn't work out. So having some good companies that I know would give me a chance at an interview if I needed to get a regular job was important. Also reducing and eliminating debt and having a good amount of savings around. And the fact that I had worked the last 4 years on the side to develop a passive income also really helped ease our concern that this wasn't going to work out, or I wouldn't have time to build up something and start earning money.

Good luck!

Hi oyinkan,

This is a good question. I like to consider the kinds of things that I want to learn and focus my coding on those specific things. I really like to practice in isolated environments so I can focus. So using things like codesandbox.io is really helpful. Good luck!

Hi Joshua,

1) StackOverflow can help. Also, take a look at what people are asking others who do have a big following. You can search for mentions of that user and you'll find questions. Add a "?" to the search. Like this: twitter.com/search

2) This is something that comes with practice, but maybe this post will help How I Teach

3) I never really explored business models to be honest 😬 I know it's not very helpful, but egghead just kinda fell into my lap. You can read more about that story from my 2010s decade in review.

I wouldn't see working in industry as a "do my time" proposition. It's an incredibly great and very important learning experience. You can't pretend to teach people how to build production applications if you've never done that yourself. When you're a teacher you actually spend most of your time learning. You become a professional learner and you'll really need that time you've spend learning what it's like to build and ship production applications in the real world. Eventually I plan to build and ship something again to re-vamp my skills and stay sharp.

Good luck!

Kent C. Dodds

Awesome! Thanks for the elaborate response!

I've never done PHP or Go in a real environment so I can't say one way or the other, but it sounds like a good change to me.

Hi Saravanan,

Styles are all about the way the component looks. You can't test that reliably without visual regression testing tools. So if you need confidence that the look of your components remains unchanged, I recommend you take a look Applitools or Percy. Good luck!

Kent C. Dodds Thank you Kent for the recommendation. May I know how different it is from snapshot testing?

Hi Cecil,

Welcome to the career of coding! One thing you can do is get involved in open source (kcd.im/what-oss) and starting blogging regularly. Good luck!

Hi Jeremy,

I'm actually working on an update to The Beginner's Guide to React right now, so this is on my mind a lot recently. The main concepts I teach in there are: React elements, JSX, custom function components, event handling, state, and side-effects. That's pretty much it.

Awesome! Would you feel comfortable giving an estimated release date for the update to that course?

Kent C. Dodds

Hi Milica,

When I was at PayPal I worked on our Node app, but I never worked on performance issues myself, so I have limited knowledge to give you around performance and node. What I would say is make sure you have good monitoring in place so you can be made aware of performance issues and ensure you're optimizing the codepaths that are actually slow and don't just seem like they might be slow to you when you look at the code. Good luck!

Hi Mohd,

Structure and making it easy for beginners is the kind of thing that comes with lots of practice. When I was starting out, the ideas I got for blog posts came from things I was learning every week. Everyone learns something new each week. Write about that. Or sometimes I write about something I want to learn (Super Simple Start to ESModules in the Browser is an example of this). Over time, I get people asking me questions about things and when I get asked the same question over and over, I write a blog post about it so I don't have to repeat myself. Having an AMA on GitHub is another helpful way for me to get inspiration and keep track of ideas.

Another thing you might find useful (with regard to helping make it easier for beginners): How I Teach

With all of this, the real success comes with consistency. And don't be afraid of publishing something that's not perfect. You can change it later. Just get that content out there! Good luck!

Thank you Kent C. Dodds