I watched a fascinating talk on GraphQL. Its premise is what made it fascinating; to convince people on the other side, we need to understand their reasoning to the point where we can make the argument more convincing than they can. Instead of talking about why we need to use GraphQL, Robert Zhu discusses the pitfalls of GraphQL at a GraphQL conference so that we understand the skeptics. Watching this talk made me reexamine how I promoted new ideas at work.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior – Mark Erikson

As I worked on building an interactive and performant table of thousands of items, I learned I still didn’t fully understand how React hooks behave. For example,

• When I have multiple setState statements, will they force the component to rerender multiple times?
• When I use multiple useEffect hooks, in what order do they run?
• How is setState from useState different from the class component’s this.setState?

This excellent guide by Redux maintainer Mark Erikson answered all of my questions.

Demystifying Cache Normalization – Apollo

If you are using Apollo client, you need to read this article. It explains how Apollo Client uses GraphQL’s typed schema to denormalize and cache the responses and also goes into the limits of the Client in specific mutations.

People ❤️

Coinbase is a mission focused company – Brian Armstrong

Coinbase CEO announced that “we don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus” while “we need to do a better job of being authentic about who we are.”

This announcement is full of irony. We cannot be authentic when we cannot talk about the things that impact us. Unless, of course, all your issues are already mainstream that they aren’t deemed “political.”

GitLab’s outbound recruiting model – Gitlab

GitLab has turned its recruiting model on its head. They explicitly state that “we do not accept inbound applications for our roles.” Looking back at my manager days, I realize all my best hires were from referrals and outbound sourcing. Maybe it’s not a bad approach if I can invest a significant amount of time recruiting.

Business 💸

Bond was the last straw: Regal and Cineworld will reportedly close all theaters in US and UK next week – The Verge

With the disappointing result from the highly expected movie “Tenet” and other blockbusters postponed until 2021, the second-largest US theater chain is also now shutting down its operations until 2021. Given the way things are going in the US, I wonder if any theaters will survive at all.