Do you know of the red car syndrome?

When we learn and start using a new language, or especially a framework, we tend to see how some people do something.

But my point is not that after start learning something you start seeing everywhere and all the people using it... but that people will follow “tradition” blindly. In Python, the community has the saying of something being the “pythonic way”.

Yes, you should embrace “tradition” and make things simpler for everyone... except when you don’t.

Many React developers out there will start a project and add Redux (or MobX, or Recoil... ) without even thinking if the project will even need it.

And after they do that, since it’s already there it’s easy to just “go with the motion” and just make things in a way to use Redux.

There’s this story that you might have heard, it’s about someone trying to learn the family recipe of baking fish and that “you have to cut the tail to make it good” and then they would go from parent to grandparent to ask why you have to make the cut only to be told that it’s “how it’s always been done to make it good”, and finally the great grandparent will say that the oven was too small back in the day and they had to cut it to fit...

And as history repeats itself, if you found anything I’m saying eerie familiar, then yes, more than 10 years ago Uncle Bob wrote that developers would start a project with a database because “you always needed a database right?”.

Redux is just one of the latest... moment.js, Lodash, jQuery... remember then?

Remember that the problem is not if you are or not using then, but WHY are you using it.
Just because? Or it’s the best tool for the job?

Cover Photo by Mohit Tomar on Unsplash