Flux has become trendy in the past few months, and you’ve seen everyone and their dog roll out their own implementations. The momentum around this pattern is so hard to ignore that, if you are a React beginner, you might be in a position where you think that Flux is the way to write React apps, but you’re frustrated that you don’t get it.

This is a problem. It is in React’s spirit to constantly question the dogma, and we must be careful not to introduce a dogma of our own. As a community, we need to teach the beginners to keep their eyes wide open so that they can recognize it when something better than Flux comes along.

Friends don’t let friends pick a design pattern blindly.

If you used Microsoft stack in 00's, you remember the dominant NIM mentality: Not Invented at Microsoft. Nobody would use an ORM unless it came from the blessed vendor.

The web community as a whole is far from this thinking but we must still be alert because no dogma starts out as a dogma.

A dogma is born when the solutions are presented without enough original context, and newcomers feel pressured to delegate crucial decisions to an authority.

This might feel reassuring at first, but you can’t escape the nagging suspicion that the choice might have been wrong. This suspicion will fuel you to either ask questions (net win), abandon the solution without understanding when it’s applicable (loss for you), or to spread the dogma (or publicly speak against it) sans the context (net loss).

As the time passes and the context is forgotten, dogma stays. Acolytes form a bubble to protect themselves from fear of what they didn’t learn in the past, evaluation of the choices they make in the present and irrelevance of their dogma in the future. What a way to waste everyone’s time!

Rest assured, you’re not stupid. Sometimes we suck at explanations, and you’re well within your rights to demand better ones. As an industry, we must try harder at being inclusive, and inclusiveness means less ego, petty camps and slogans, and more mentorship, stealing good ideas and knowledge distillation.

It’s our generation’s fault if today’s good ideas are forgotten and rediscovered again in thirty years because nobody made them accessible.