Weekly Links: January 12th

JavaScript And The Web

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree| Michael Weststrate on Egghead - Mobx-state-tree is an opinionated state library built on top of the unopinionated Mobx library. This is a free course explaining why it exists and how to use it. I wrote about Mobx last year and am still enjoying using it a year later. I’m excited to dive into Mobx-state-tree and hopefully sharpen my Mobx skills in the process.

Programming Tools And Practices

The State of Atom’s Performance | Atom Blog - Atom continues to (slowly) become snappier. I’m glad to see how organized they are on this. It’s really hard to take something that was built with a slower architecture fast while it’s being used by tens of thousands of people every day. They’re making great progress.

Clean Architecture | Robert C Martin - I’ll probably be posting more on this soon, but I’ve been reading the new book on architecture by “Uncle Bob” Martin, and it’s fantastic. It breaks down big architecture and program design concepts like the Single Responsibility Principle and Dependency Inversion, and explains them well individually, but also shows how they fit together when designing a large system. I’ll write a full review when I finish the book, but for now just wanted to share that it is worth picking up.

Non-Tech

North Carolina Is Ordered To Redraw Its Congressional Map | NY Times - A little bit of local news here ¹, but it is still important for everyone in the USA. Redistricting is the type of problem where a simple rules based algorithm could be helpful. Nothing opaque or deep-learning-y, just have a machine apply a published set of rules and work with the results.