From the book “Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers. When a friend says something interesting to me, I usually don’t have a reaction until much later. When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next day, I have an answer. I’m a disappointing person to try to debate or attack. I just have nothing to say in the moment, except maybe, “Good point.” Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response.

Code review is an essential part of software development. It is a process where peers review code written by their colleagues to find bugs, ensure quality, and maintain code standards. Most new developers assume that the code review’s only purpose is to find bugs, but in reality, it is much more than that. It is a place to ask questions, to bring the code up to the team’s standard, and to check if the overall architectural decisions make sense.

I’ve just deployed a very minimal react playground at react.pukhanov.ru. This is something that I will use to provide examples during code review, a tool with focus on code logic and its execution. No direct editors for styles or HTML. The source for this playground is published on GitHub if that’s something you might be interested in. There’s no documentation yet, but it’s a fairly straightforward Next.js project. Just npm install and npm run dev to run it locally.

This study is not scientific in any sense of the word, nor does it claim to be. Moreover, being deeply subjective and expressing not objective truth, but the author’s own deeply biased views and experiences, it should be read more like a work of fiction. Again: my aim is to mostly talk about personal experience. Generalizing it and writing in third person makes more sense to me at this time.

Web Vitals is a set of ±10 metrics compiled by Google’s internal team to assess and quantify web page performance. The value of this particular set of metrics, and the reason it’s popular with frontend developers, is that all of these metrics have a direct impact on the user experience of page visitors. This means that if we improve these metrics, we are objectively improving the experience of users visiting our site.

My current project at work is a React app. I’ve joined this team only a couple of months ago, but I’ve been happy to learn that my new colleagues have been considerate of the code quality: the codebase is 100% TypeScript, excluding some Node modules, which I always prefer over JavaScript, and most of the components and helper functions are covered by unit tests, which use the Jest framework. At that moment in time, I was new to Jest.