The Call Kent Podcast
197 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago -The Call Kent podcast is a regular podcast where you call in with a question and Kent answers. Call in with your questions right from your web browser with any device at https://kentcdodds.com/call
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Episodes
Versioning and dependency management for libraries
November 16, 2021 00:42 - 5 minutes - 4.73 MBHow did you approach versioning and dependency management when you were building this reusable component library at PayPal? I would like to know 1. How did you go about introducing breaking changes? 2. How did you make sure that people are using the latest version of your library or it doesn’t matter if they are using the same version? What’s bad about having different teams using different versions of the same library?
Full stack framework vs front-end with saas
November 13, 2021 05:45 - 6 minutes - 6.06 MBI have a question with regards to building out a minimum viable product. I am comparing using a full stack framework like django, that includes authentication and arm’s and routing and all the batteries builtin, versus creating a react app with all the backend farmed out to saas offering like auth0 for auth and the millions of sql/nosql/graphql. With django approach, you have simple dynamic pages with server side generation and when you’re ready you can separate out the frontend to...
Learning Gaps & Cluelessness as a Developer
November 10, 2021 13:31 - 7 minutes - 7.16 MBHello Kent, I learnt software development in a self-taught path and I really didn't do a good job (Now I know) because when I hear words like Serverless and others, I don't have the first clue what they are talking about. In summary, I'm clueless about a lot of things and I need help.
Alfred and/or ScriptKit?
November 06, 2021 15:13 - 7 minutes - 7.08 MBYour thoughts on Alfred and ScriptKit.
Why React JS?
November 05, 2021 18:06 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MBWe're observing a lot of feedback about React and started to think "why". Why not Svetle or Vue? Why not something else. And it's also inspired by what you have put on the epicreact.dev landing page about why React is awesome. One of the good examples for more context please read: https://dev.to/jfbrennan/really-why-react-5958 Why I Love React The Beginner's Guide to React
Bailing out of re-rendering in useState
November 05, 2021 17:34 - 4 minutes - 4.14 MBIf useState contains a simple value like string or int, setting a new value that is the same as the existing value will not cause the component to re-render. However, if useState contains an object and I update the state with a new object that contains the exact same values, it will trigger the component to re-render. The React documentation says that is used Object.is to compare values. My 2 objects are identical, so why does the re-render happen? useState lazy initialization an...
Remix Styling w/CSS in JS
November 05, 2021 01:15 - 8 minutes - 7.81 MBTrying to figure out whether a CSS in JS approach will take a significance performance hit when using Remix, and whether it would be better to stick to remote and plain stylesheets. Also wondering whether Remix has any Babel-like class naming structure, or if there might be support for Babel in the future. Why Remix over other React frameworks? How Remix makes CSS clashes predictable
Learning web development the right way
November 03, 2021 16:41 - 7 minutes - 6.57 MBAs web developers, we come across a lot of topics and want to build a solid foundation on them. We also need to know what to focus on at certain stages in our journey. Deciding What Not To Learn How to get started with programming Dealing with FOMO How to get experience as a software engineer How to React ⚛️
Testing a Drag and Drop Experience
November 02, 2021 22:33 - 3 minutes - 3.7 MBCan I test drag and drop with React Testing library?
Protected route and redirect after payment
October 27, 2021 23:02 - 6 minutes - 5.81 MBHey Kent, Thanks for the chance to ask you a question. This is about protected route and 3rd party payment flow, ending in a re-direct back to my website. The user would need to re-login again. How to avoid that? Super Simple Start to Remix Stop using client-side route redirects
Protected route and redirect after payment
October 27, 2021 23:02 - 6 minutes - 5.81 MBHey Kent, Thanks for the chance to ask you a question. This is about protected route and 3rd party payment flow, ending in a re-direct back to my website. The user would need to re-login again. How to avoid that? Super Simple Start to Remix Stop using client-side route redirects
Making changes on a new team
October 26, 2021 21:40 - 13 minutes - 12.4 MBAs a designer/developer on a new team, where I'm also the most experienced, but haven't been given the path to recommending change wherever necessary. In other words, I was brought on to be an individual contributor, not specifically a consultant, although it's very obvious in many places that the app lacked a designer, and that the code lacked senior developers. For context, they don't do JavaScript testing because "the team was new when we started and we wanted them to get off and...
Building an Open Source Website
October 26, 2021 21:27 - 8 minutes - 8.23 MBWe are looking to build an open source website for students of our organization in college. What are some tips that can help with the building and management of such a project.
Question about testing alongside RTL
October 25, 2021 15:56 - 7 minutes - 6.78 MBWe use RTL at work and I also use it for personal project. I understand what RTL is and what it isn't. My question is what are you using alongside RTL in terms of frontend testing? At work I'm pondering implementing Visual Regression testing on a large React application to cover things like unwanted CSS changes, but am also afraid of the overhead. Also, have you found any times that unit testing > RTL? Chromatic Storybook Percy.io Applitools The Testing Trophy and Testing Class...
Create web components in React
October 22, 2021 20:12 - 7 minutes - 6.9 MBI wonder if you have any thoughts about creating web components in React.
Magic links require timely email delivery
October 20, 2021 23:41 - 6 minutes - 6.27 MBWhen relying solely on passwordless magic links for signing users in to your application, you make the timely delivery of these links to people's inboxes a critical dependency for using your app. Though unlikely, it's not impossible that a mail service provider experiences an outage blocking your users for logging in. Less dramatic, but equally likely, your application might get throttled which could cause these login emails to arrive after the included links have already expired. W...
Some advice for developers about the design
October 20, 2021 23:33 - 2 minutes - 2.54 MBI wonder how you created the design for kentcdodds.com.It would be great if some resources or tips are shared. Design for Developers by Sarah Drasner Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger
Pricing low-demand workshops
October 20, 2021 23:27 - 5 minutes - 4.75 MBHow should I think about pricing a workshop when demand for it is low? I enjoy the topic so I'm happy to teach it, and I want to be paid fairly for my time, but I don't expect to get much re-sale value out of it.
Why XState?
October 19, 2021 13:36 - 6 minutes - 5.95 MBI see you use XState on your new website. Why and how do you use it? Are there any best practices and pitfalls? Implementing a simple state machine library in JavaScript
Forms in React
October 19, 2021 13:29 - 4 minutes - 4.45 MBWhat do you use for dealing with forms in React? Improve the Performance of your React Forms
How small should components be
October 19, 2021 13:24 - 3 minutes - 3.68 MBI was wondering how to decide when the html is too trivial to turn into a component. For example turning msg into a component. Maybe it's useful for styled components? Thanks When to break up a component into multiple components
Using Fly.io Replays
October 18, 2021 22:27 - 12 minutes - 11.7 MBFinding out more about the best places to use Fly.io's request replays, when to use it and when not to use it. How I built a modern website in 2021
Why is forwardRef required to limit re-renders?
October 18, 2021 22:13 - 7 minutes - 6.83 MBIn the "Fix perf death by a thousand cuts" exercise in the Epic React Performance workshop, extra credit 3 "write an HOC to get a slice of app state": why is forwarding the ref in the HOC required to actually prevent all the Cells from re-rendering? 06.extra-3.js Production deploy of that example
Traditional logins vs. passwordless magic links
October 14, 2021 15:50 - 14 minutes - 13 MBYour website currently uses magic links to sign in users. This seems to be a completely secure method of authentication, yet is still quite uncommon compared to the traditional username + password combo's. Why do you think that is? If it's just as secure, or perhaps more secure, how can we improve adoption of this method? How I built a modern website in 2021 (I've got a section in here that describes the auth flow)
How to plan curriculum
October 13, 2021 18:29 - 4 minutes - 4.45 MBI need some tips to write a course and suggestions to choose the app idea, decompose it into lessons, things to focus on, deploy the app and writing tests. Taylor Bell Chats About Effective Teaching How I Teach
Why Remix over other React frameworks?
October 12, 2021 20:34 - 35 minutes - 32.8 MBWhat brings you to Remix over other React frameworks like Next and Gatsby? Remix is going open source soon so I'd love to pad my excitement even further with knowing truly what it brings over its competitors. How I Built a Modern Website in 2021 (blog post) How I Built a Modern Website in 2021 (slides) Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris
What did paypal-scripts do?
October 11, 2021 18:03 - 6 minutes - 5.78 MBI'd like to learn more about paypal-scripts. What tasks did the package cover: linting, transpiling, CI, deploy, etc. Please share any advice you can about starting a similar toolkit. Tools without config Concerning Toolkits
What are your thoughts on Svelte?
October 09, 2021 20:21 - 11 minutes - 10.4 MBCam asks Kent his thoughts on the uprising JS framework, Svelte. Remix
Where did those diagrams come from?
October 09, 2021 15:34 - 2 minutes - 2.48 MBI wonder how you created those architecture diagrams with that hand drawn feel to them. How I built a modern website in 2021 Excalidraw
Filling CS concept holes as a non-CS major?
October 07, 2021 18:07 - 5 minutes - 5.36 MBI come from non-CS background, MIS. Since you also come from a non-CS background, did you find that you needed to fill in any holes in your knowledge to get to where you are today?
How to buy for EpicReact in "installments"
October 06, 2021 15:45 - 6 minutes - 5.79 MBEpic React has been on my radar ever since you started teasing it on Twitter. To me it feels like a "must have" that I "can't have". Obviously, it has a pretty hefty price tag, which I'm sure it more than warrants. But because of that price tag, it becomes unaffordable to me personally, and with my workplace being quite small, they're not always as forthcoming as I'd hope when it comes to paying for something like this either. I was wondering if you've ever considered adding pay...
Best approach for building headless components
October 06, 2021 15:39 - 9 minutes - 8.37 MBWhich of the approaches you have talked about (prop getters & compound components) is best for building UI-free components? Inspired by this thread. P.S. I think you should definitely rename prop getters to the IKEA pattern. downshift How to give rendering control to users with prop getters
Cypress Component Testing Library vs Jest
September 29, 2021 03:00 - 4 minutes - 4.38 MBLibraries comparison: pros and cons of cypress Component Testing Library vs RTL Cypress Testing Library
How does Remix manage many CSS files in a page?
September 24, 2021 15:34 - 4 minutes - 3.96 MBThat’s a follow-up question to Call Kent Podcast 09 “How to style?" Did you mention on "Call Kent Podcast 09 - How to style?" the remix capability to get the link tags removed from the page when the route is no longer active and with that, the styles could get removed as well, helping to avoid CSS clashes. How does Remix manage situations where the page that is active has multiple components, and those components are using different CSS files and potentially changing the same sele...
Mirage JS over MSW?
September 23, 2021 15:13 - 6 minutes - 5.6 MBWant to see what would be your opinions regarding MirageJs and if it could be a potential replacement of MSW.
Work Life Balance
September 22, 2021 15:51 - 10 minutes - 9.24 MBThere's no doubt that Kent C. Dodds is a top teacher on the web helping people write quality software. What does the work life balance look like for someone at this level? How can one continuously be on top of the latest changes on the web, while maintaining that work life balance.
How much of seniority is about code skills?
September 21, 2021 20:12 - 7 minutes - 7.36 MBComing up with a huge precedence from testingjavascript people can tend to come up with unfair expectations for other content such as "Epic React", I would love to hear your thoughts on what to expect from your content while looking for seniority levels The Coding Career Handbook How to get experience as a software engineer
Firm skills
September 20, 2021 14:23 - 5 minutes - 4.95 MBQuestion about documentation / tests / naming convention as an important software engineer skill
How to style?
September 19, 2021 18:07 - 9 minutes - 8.39 MBNowadays, we have a bunch of approaches that we can take to style our applications, like: pure CSS, pre-processors, CSS Modules, utilities, component UI’s, CSS in JS and for some of them, we have another bunch of libraries that we can choose as well. Sometimes we can get lost in the middle of them trying to find the better one for our needs. What do you take into consideration when choosing an approach to style? Do you think that some use cases fit better in one approach than in a...
SSG Hype
September 15, 2021 22:15 - 13 minutes - 12.8 MBWhy do you think there’s still so much hype around JamStack and SSG, when form submissions and server redirects for data mutations tend to work better a lot of the time? There’s not a lot of ecosystem interest (outside of Remix) to lean on this baked-in superpower of the web, and I find that interesting. This is less about the tech, and more about the psychology in the JS ecosystem. Maybe it’s a funding or marketing thing? next-runtime
Managing Burnout
September 10, 2021 17:13 - 3 minutes - 3.19 MBI’ve been feeling burned out lately and wanted to hear how do you deal with it. Boundaries, Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
Make It Stick: Interleave Curves
September 07, 2021 22:03 - 5 minutes - 4.77 MBIn the book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. They suggest that for mastery of a subject you should be using interleave curves. The analogy given in the book to explain that is while practicing baseball you should be switching between straight and curveballs instead of doing just one or the other. What does that look like in practice while studying a topic?
What is the best way to go through EpicReact?
September 07, 2021 21:54 - 9 minutes - 8.63 MBAs a self taught dev who is looking to get their first job in the industry, how do you think the best way to balance this course and personal projects is? What do you think is the best use of my time as a developer to not only gain the most from this course, but also show off and apply the knowledge. How to get experience as a software engineer Solidifying what you learn
How do you find new technology
September 07, 2021 05:29 - 2 minutes - 2.56 MBAsking Kent for insight into how he finds new technologies to use for his projects. Zero to 60 in Software Development: How to Jumpstart Your Career - Forward 4 Web Summit
Difference in methods emanating from screen and render
September 03, 2021 17:40 - 4 minutes - 4.28 MBWhat’s the difference between `screen.getByText` and `const { getByText } = render()` More generically - what’s the difference between methods originating from these different objects Common mistakes with React Testing Library - Not Using Screen
Dealing with "act" warning on react testing
September 03, 2021 17:28 - 6 minutes - 5.84 MBSo I have a MainComponent, inside there are some “remote” components like OfficeSelect, that fetches data asynchronously on mount, using axios, everytime I test MainComponent I get the “act” warning on that OfficeSelect fetch, how do I deal with that? Fix the “not wrapped in act(…)” warning
Reusing components between different projects
September 03, 2021 16:50 - 6 minutes - 5.61 MBbit.dev is one option I’ve considered, but I’m curious what you would do.