Comment by epolanski
10 hours ago
You reminded me of a time where one of my clients asked me to add a feature on a file uploader written in react/redux. This was early 2021.
I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways, the form literally had a textual input, a button to open the file explorer and a submit button.
It took few weeks one of their Romanian team to build it and apparently that team was reassigned and nobody could touch it without them.
I remember writing pages and pages of notes to understand how this all tied up in those extremely complex chains and claiming progress after few hours when I achieved to simplify the flow by removing a handful of these actions. Hooray.
Then it suddenly dawned on me that...I could just rewrite it from scratch.
Nuked the entirety of that nonsense and replaced it with a single useState in a matter of few hours also implemented the newly requested features.
The client could not believe my progress and the fact I also removed many of their previous issues.
Then I had a second realization: React was useless too and it got dropped for native HTML forms and a handful of JS callbacks.
> I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways
I 100% believe this, as it describes all the redux codebases I've seen. The library seems to be an antipattern of indirection.
This sounds like an engineering quality problem rather than a tooling problem.
Well structured redux (or mobx or zustand for that matter) can be highly maintainable & performant, in comparison to a codebase with poorly thought out useState calls littered everywhere and deep levels of prop drilling.
Redux Toolkit has been a nice batteries-included way to use redux for a while now https://redux-toolkit.js.org/
But the popularity of Redux especially in the earlier days of react means there are quite a lot of redux codebases around, and by now many of them are legacy.
> The library seems to be an antipattern of indirection.
Auto-generated actions from slices are a codified way to do what was once considered an antipattern: Tying an action directly to a single reducer, instead of actions being an action the user could do on a page (which multiple reducers could respond to).
I really can't understand how someone would make 30 redux actions for a simple use case, as someone has implemented the exact same thing. But yes, not a fan of Redux myself
Have some pity for those Senior Expert Architect Full-Stack Developers (fresh out of boot camp) in urgent need of job security.
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Many years ago, I used Redux to build real time streaming data processing layer. Basically I need to receive, merge, and process multiple data streams into a single realtime data pool. After that,consuming the realtime data becomes dead easy.
Even now I am not sure I could find a better tool to deal with real time data and synchronization. But for simple crud Redux is mostly overkill
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