Joel Hooks co-founder of egghead.io, interviews Dan Abramov, co-author of Redux. They discuss the "Redux phenomenon" and the notion of improving the developer experience.

Dan's Redux course has been the most popular course on egghead.io for years. What caused Redux to blow up as it did? Dan is here today to talk about the problems he faced that inspired him to write this framework, and all the experiences he had that led to it.

Joel and Dan talk about how quickly functional programming concepts pushed their way into the mainstream. When they were younger object oriented was how you programmed, Gang of Four was like their bible. However, Dan talks about the problems he was facing and how they inspired him to create Redux.

Dan's belief that user experience starts with the developer also inspired Redux. The notion that a developer should suffer is silly. Having a tool that is a joy to use and allows a programmer just to create things is invaluable.

The frustration of getting started with React was enormous. You had to deal with Webpack and install packages manually and hope that you didn't mess up. All this was hugely daunting for beginners especially. create-react-app was the solution for that. Allowing an easy way to get React going with a dev server and all, it let you just get in there and start building components.

Finally, Joel and Dan leave us with a note to those seeking to learn to program well. Read GitHub like it's a blog. Read the commits, the issues, the PR's, all of it. You might not understand what is going on now, but you will build fluency and eventually you'll understand well enough that you can start to answer questions and contribute.

Transcript

"Dan Abramov, co-author of Redux" Transcript

Resources

• Getting Started with Redux
• Building React Applications with Idiomatic Redux
• Gang of Four
• Game Programming Patterns

Dan Abramov

• Twitter
• Github
• Blog

Joel Hooks

• Twitter
• Website