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Sebastian Markbage: Minimal API Surface Area | JSConf EU 2014

JSConf · 70.7K views · 2014-10-15 · 24:28

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Overview

Sebastian Markbage explains how React is moving toward a minimal API surface by leaning on language features and patterns instead of dedicated framework APIs. He also touches on JSX and syntax proposals for future JavaScript.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a statement of React's early design philosophy of keeping APIs small and understanding JavaScript itself.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

Web developmentSoftware architecture & design
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reactapi designjavascriptjsxminimalism

What people said

msangi · 2017-02 · Recommendation

That's indeed a very good advice. All abstractions have a cost and no abstraction is better than the wrong abstraction. I found this talk on the topic very interesting [VIDEO]

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smhg · 2015-07 · Recommendation

While underscore is indeed widespread, don't let libraries keep you from thoroughly understanding JavaScript: [VIDEO]

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swyx · 2024-09 · Reference

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were the simple lessons ( [LINK] ). its easy to say in hindsight that graphql was too much for gatsby. i also believe the company went too hard for number of integrations over quality of them, an issue I had even in my interview. this was a poorer expression of the better insight that seb markbage had; just have a small api surface area bro ( [VIDEO] ) But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. the fact that vercel is pretty much the only successful frontend startup of its generation makes it an exception to the rule (there are plenty of smaller companies that are thriving, like tailwind, but it is not a venture scale startup and thats fine). People dont pay for frontend tooling. they expect it to be free, expect it to do everything, get into internicine squabbles between frameworks when they are all basically doomed compared to just betting on React sponsored by Facebook and now Vercel (and a little bit of Shopify), or going back to fullstack frameworks like Django/Rails/Laravel. all frontend tooling, nextjs included, is just leadgen, loss

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Sources

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