Web Components

I really want to try and understand these better as I think they are offering a standards-based, no-build solution for components combined with a better way of dropping in lightweight vanilla JS interactivity to a page where I might have used AlpineJS before now.

I’m still at the basic learning stage but I’ve been hopping around the Lean Web Club tutorials to get a sense of the basics. One of the things that is already interesting is that Web Components wrap their child HTML is quite a clear and scoped way so you can use them quite easily to mix server rendered content with runtime dynamic content. I haven’t found an elegant way to do that with other frameworks.

Scoping and Shaping

I attended an online course by John Cutler which was a pretty good introduction to idea of enabling constraints. Most times I like to attend courses and classes to learn something but every now and then it feels good to calibrate on what seems obvious and easy and understand other people’s struggles with what seems basic stuff.

A few takeaways: being a good stakeholder is an underrated skill and being clear about the boundaries of what you’re willing to accept is important to allow teams working on problems to be successful. If someone says they can’t work with your constraints then its not a good fit, if no-one can work with your constraints then you either need to do the work yourself or give up on it.

The most insightful piece of the meeting for me came around the psychology of leaders in the new economy where profits are more important than growth and experimentation. John’s theory is that this pressure makes it harder for executive teams to sign off on decisions or to give teams a lot of leeway in approaching the problem. To provide meaningful feedback to executing teams senior stakeholders feel they need more information and understanding about the decisions they are making and the more hierarchical an organisation the more information needs to go up the chain before decisions can come back down.

Before zero interest rates there used to be a principle that it wasn’t worth discussing something that wouldn’t make back the cost of discussing it. Maybe rather than doing more with less we should be trying to get back to simple not doing things unless they offer a strong and obvious return.

How I learned to love JS classes

I have never really liked or seen the point in Javascript’s class functionality. Javascript is still a prototype-based language so the class syntax is basically complex syntax sugar. React’s class-based implementation was complex in terms of how the class lifecycle and scope interacted with the component equivalent so I was glad to see it replaced by stateless components. However classes are pretty much the only way that you can work with Web Components so I’ve been doing a lot more of them recently than previously.

I’ve also been dropping them into work projects although it raises some interesting questions when you’re using Typescript as the difference between a class and an interface is quite blurry there. Presumably classes should either have static elements or also encapsulate behaviour to make the inheritance meaningful otherwise it’s simply an interface that the implementing class needs to provide.