Helsinki JS. April edition

It was sunny day in Helsinki: the spring almost here, despite the fact that only couple of days ago it was snowing. I was on my way to the Hive office, where the Helsinki JS meetup was held. It's located in the northeastern district of Helsinki Sörnäinen, which is quite close to the city center, but I took a tram to get there.

The Hive office is a cozy place with a lot of space in the scene area. It was not usual thing, because most of office spaces, which were used for meetups, are quite small. But this one was different. The Hive is not usual software company as you may thing as a venute for meetup. It's the coding school, but not a regular one if you may think either. They are teaching coding in a different way: they have only one teacher and students self-organized in groups to study foundamentals of programming in the sync with each other. It's quite interesting concept, but I've heard about it earlier. This concept of a school become very popular in the 10s in France: there is a School 42 in Paris, which become the first one in the world with such model and it spreaded around the world. I've personally heard about one in Russia: "Школа 21" (School 21)^ru The Hive is the first one in Finland with such model. Community manager, who was hosting the meetup, told the audience that they have a lot of success stories of hires from their school. Alongside of huge space in the scene area, there was a lot of space for students to study and work on their projects: there were a lot of tables with computers and chairs in specially organized open-spaces — "Clusters", stuffed with all programming equipment: tables, chairs, Macs. It was quite impressive.

The first talk was from students of this school. They talked about importance of studying foundation and not stick to the one UI framework knowledge only. The rest of talk was dedicated to something similar legendary WTF JS and as a consluion they stated that it's important to know the basics of the language and not stick to the one framework only. Well, who can argue with that?

The next talk was about about Tailwind CSS. It's quite interesting concept of the CSS library, where you assign style properties for your web elements/components/whatever right in your list of css classes with specialy created shorthands for every style property in CSS. It's quite interesting concept and I think it's worth to try it in the real project. When I was leaving Bolt I've seen the beginning of migration of some projects to it and I was relatively skeptical about it, but now I think it's worth to try it at least. Couple of important things, which I've took from the talk: don't use tailwind-merge and don't use passing prop className from top to down in React, i.e., because order is important .

The last talk was dedicated to the way to architect the web application: stateless first development. The main idea of the architecture: prevent usage of global state of all bottom level components and propogate changes to the state through bubbling events from bottom to top. This concept helps to prevent evolving organization of your UI codebase to spaghetti architecture. Interesting happened also in the questions part of the talk: one of the audience shared note about impossibility easily do propogate events from bottom to top in React, because of the prop drilling, which considered anti-pattern in the React world and all of developers, including core team, recommend to use Context, which, in it's turn, is anti-pattern for the architecture from the talk. The speaker agreed with that and said that it's a problem, but it's not a problem of the architecture, but the problem of the React itself. Both of them more prefer to use Vue.js, because it's more flexible in this case.

The organizers announced that they are planning to organize the summer event in the June. It will be held in Pasila and there will be members of the TC39 committee, who are working on the standard. It's quite interesting event and I'm looking forward to it. The next meetup in May will be held in the office of Finnair in Vantaa. One downsize that it quite distant from the city center, but I think it's worth to visit it, especially if the weather will be good 🌸.