Backbone to React: good UI code in large codebases.

Server Density’s journey from a large backbone codebase (60K custom lines) to a large Reactjs codebase continues to be an interesting one. Starting 16 months ago, it has highlighted a great deal about good code vs bad code, or good code vs great code depending on your perspective.

In this talk I was hugely excited to share some of the “aha!” moments this journey has lead to. Essentially it was an attempt to answer the questions “Just why is Reactjs so simple?” and “What can that teach us about how to write good code?”. To do this I broke the talk down into three concepts: simplicity vs complexity, predictability and composability.

This was a very technical presentation, but I wanted to make it clear that good code is a means to an end, not the end itself. Good code is great n all, but it needs to achieve things like shipping faster, shipping higher quality, fewer regressions, better usability. Without that, it’s all just very academic. Have we achieved these things at Server Density? Yes, 100%, and using stats and experience gained from our codebase I tried my best to prove this.

If this topic is of interest then check out the video and the slides and tweet me your thoughts. Lastly, thanks very much to the very successful and very well organized FrontendNE for having me. Meet-ups like this are the lifeblood of the tech industry and I know from experience how much effort they take to run.