51: Michel Westrate Wants You To Stop Writing State Reducers

How many times have you written a state reducer?

100 times?

100 times a month?

Truth is, it's tricky for human brains to write performant state mutations in immutable terms.

Maybe you're whip smart and you've got the theory on lock but the resulting "spread hell" is hard to read and edit long term.

Michel Westrate wants you to stop writing state updates with immutable APIs like spread, concat, and slice and take a second look at mutable APIs like property assignment, forEach, and push.

He's made it really easy

And the React Team finds this idea very interesting.

We talk with Michel about this wild of idea of state producers (not reducers) in Immer, why they're in the spirit of React, his MobX fame, and why — even in 2019 — it's not a good idea to roll your own state management library.

Listen cautiously though.

After this episode, you may never write a state reducer again...

Michel Westrate — Twitter, Website, GitHub
Michael Chan — Twitter, Github, Website

Links

React, transparent reactive programming and mutable data structures | Reactive 2015 Michel's first conference talk, introducing MobX
Mobx — Simple, scalable state management
Dojo
React Conf recap: Hooks, Suspense, and Concurrent Rendering — Suspense, Hooks, and ConcurrentMode announcement
Immer — Create the next immutable state by mutating the current one
Michel Weststrate - Immer, Immutability and the Wonderful World of Proxies | ReactNext 2018 — Introduction to Immer and "spread hell"

Sponser

G2i is a hiring platform for remote developers devoted exclusively to React and React Native.

Check out G2i today and get matched with React & React Native roles that are fully remote at companies who are serious about quality engineering.

Visit G2i today and click the "for developers" link to find opportunities.

G2i: We Vet, You Hire, It's that Simple.