Obsessive Colouring Launch

My wonderfully talented wife has launched obsessivecolouring.co.uk - it's full of beautiful colouring pages which are designed to help calm the mind and relieve stress. I'm always in awe of her attention to detail and really happy to see her pursue her dreams :D

If you have a moment, please go check it out and let us know what you think!

Situation, Behaviour, Impact - SBI Feedback

Dan North gave a presentation at QCon on "Making a Sandwich: Effective Feedback Techniques" which you can watch here: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/feedback-models-techniques/

I found the parts around the "SBI model" (Situation, Behaviour, Impact) triggered me to reflect on how I give/seek feedback. In short, the model breaks down effective feedback into 3 steps:

1. Situation - specify a real incident that happened, e.g. "when we talked with Alfred on Wednesday..."
2. Behaviour - state a fact, e.g. "you spoke across me multiple times..."
3. Impact - describe how it affected you, e.g. "I felt that I my opinions were being ignored"

For steps 1 and 2, the rule of thumb I follow is that I can only comment on "things that are observable on a video tape". So saying something like: "they don't respect my opinion" wouldn't count, but "when I described my strategy, they rolled their eyes" is valid.

Step 3 is what I find most interesting and uncomfortable. The model is pushing me to focus on how I was affected, which I feel is very self centred. This brings up an uncomfortable truth: when I am giving feedback I am an attempting to control the other person. For me it boils down to:

• Positive feedback: "...and that helped me avoid some pain - keep it up"
• Negative feedback: "...and that caused me some pain - please stop"

I feel I can give the most effective feedback when I have something to gain.  Flipping this around and looking at how I seek feedback, if I really want to improve myself then I should be finding those that have something to gain from my change in behaviour.

Curiously enough, this isn't always going to be my mentors, who I traditionally turn to for feedback. Taking the SBI model to heart, I can get effective feedback from people that I impact. If I'm not impacting the person I'm talking to, I'm unlikely to get effective feedback.

My conclusion of all of this is that I can get the most effective feedback from people that I impact the most: i.e. those that are highly dependent on me.

Time to start teaching my kids about SBI... "Last night you gave me a popsicle and read me a story, that made me feel like I love you 3000"

A View On Redux (x-post from TIM Dev Blog)

tl;dr I like using Redux as it helps me keep state changes simple. There are problems to be aware of with Redux but overall my experience with it has been overwhelmingly positive. [This post was originally shared here]

The Benefits of Redux

What I like most about Redux is that I can use it to apply event sourcing to an entire React application's state.[0]This isn't unique to Redux at all. If you know of better alternatives, please let me know!

In this case, the events are actions and they are processed by reducers which update state. If all of the application's state is contained within Redux, then state can only change as a result of a reducer processing an action.

This is useful for me as I can think purely from the point of view of actions when I am thinking about state changes. I can reason about a series of actions and the resulting state. This reasoning transcribes neatly into test form, for example:

import myMathReducer from "./myMathReducer"
import {plus, times, minus} from "./myMathActions"

describe("my maths reducer", () => {
    it("performs basic arithmetic on my number", () => {
        const INITIAL_STATE = {myNumber: 5};
        const actions = [plus(1), times(2), minus(3)];
        const newState =
            actions.reduce(myMathReducer, INITIAL_STATE);

        expect(newState.myNumber).to.eql(9)
    });
});

I find this great because:

• If the test makes sense to my pair[1]Does it makes sense to you? I'm hoping it is clear that we're asserting ((5 + 1) * 2) - 3 = 9, then I've gained confidence that I've got the state transitions clear in my head.
• The test acts as documentation on what actions are available and how they change the state.
• I've tested logic within my React app without having to go near mounting components and/or clicking buttons.

The Pitfalls of Redux

I've found Redux to be hard to use in anger at times. There are some nasty surprises which make for some very painful lessons.

The worst moment was bashing up against a bug for ages and finally finding out it was related to Redux blocking updates to components. This is when I learnt that the connect function has 3rd and 4th parameters you can pass to it. The fix was to mark my component as "impure"[2]The interesting implication here is that my code is not pious enough and the Redux Gods are smiting me for my heresy, via the 3rd parameter being passed to the connect function.

Luckily there aren't too many bumps along the road but they are quite noticeable. God forbid you ever accidentally give two actions the same type!

Redux is a big plus overall

I've found that, in the long term, using Redux has been massively helpful.

For me, the constraints imposed by Redux have helped me to keep things simple.[3]Lord knows I love the KISS principle

Redux changed the way I think and improved the way I write React apps. I recommend giving it a go yourself.